so i want to have an arraylist that stores a series of stock quotes. but i keep track of bid price, ask price and last price for each.

of course at any time, the bid ask or last of a given stock can change.

i have one thread that updates the prices and one that reads them.

i want to make sure that when reading no other thread is updating a price. so i looked at synchronized collection. but that seems to only prevent reading while another thread is adding or deleting an entry to the arraylist.

so now i'm onto the wrapper approach:

public class Qte_List {
private final ArrayList<Qte> the_list;

public void UpdateBid(String p_sym, double p_bid){
    synchronized (the_list){
        Qte q = Qte.FindBySym(the_list, p_sym);
        q.bid=p_bid;}
}

public double ReadBid(String p_sym){
    synchronized (the_list){
        Qte q = Qte.FindBySym(the_list, p_sym);
        return q.bid;}
}

so what i want to accomplish with this is only one thread can be doing anything - reading or updating an the_list's contents - at one time. am i approach this right?

thanks.