Each time a user requests a buy/sell, FT (presumably) requests the spread for the stock. Could this be used to update the SP info across freetrade, and reducing the 15 info delay?
Also, if these snapshots were saved, FT would be able to track the spread through the day and display that on the historic chart.
Essentially - is freetrade making the most of the data which is available due user activity?
Anything less than 15 minutes old is licenced by the LSE and incurs (pretty substantial) fees for publication.
Anything greater than 15 minutes is not and is usually available freely elsewhere via numerous vendors.
So no point caching as can’t display it anyway. If FT want this data they can get it easily elsewhere - so, again, no real point caching and storing in-house.
CBOE have their own rules. But same kinda conclusion.
Well, again, very useful! Thanks for letting the information!
I am full of (useless) Information 
I hope you won’t mind me calling you a massive data nerd as a compliment, but as a massive data nerd and an investor, do you think this is justifiable by them? I don’t really know how the LSE makes their money but throwing up an artificial barrier that hurts the general public seems like a ‘dick move’,
Exactly how the LSE do make their money.
They’ve cornered the data licensing market.
Regulation keeps increasing the data burden and the LSE swoops on a provider in that space.
£$32 Billion (or something) for Refinitiv for example
MiFID II costs and charges disclosure forced every asset manager to get intraday tick data fir every stock they traded. On an old project I worked on at an asset manager we had to pay over £30k per month to get intraday bid/offer historic ticks from the LSE. That’s one asset manager, 1 month. Extrapolate that!
The data vendor model is broken
My attempt to make at least a tiny change was to make FinKi
Publication fees for live prices is another example. LSE charges mostly on a ‘per user’ basis. Live quotes are something like £10 per month per user per stock. That’s not entirely accurate - but it’s in that ballpark. They charge multiple times to feed the data to the same organisation … but because the ‘viewer’ is different… that’s another fee…
Quick look at the LSE financials for 2018
£841m revenue for data services and growing year on year… on which they made £440m profit
Interesting - so when I google a stock on the LSE, the chart that google shows is 15 mins delayed? And is NYSE/NASDAQ also delayed? Because I thought the google results were more real-time than on the Freetrade app
Different regulations and data vendor model in the US. Not quite so tightly controlled. US data is much easier to come by - and often (partially) free - via new players like IEX , AlphaVantage etc… the NASDAQ also has a pretty easily hacked API that contains a lot of good data 