Well Marcia, I sympathize with you.
I haven't found any good way of doing it so far, and amongst one such problem for instance is the lack of "Point and figure" charts, an absolute elementary basic form of financial charting. Those graph programmes that do exist are centered around the kind of "windows" programmes, which usually mean plain old single line graphs , bar charts, pie charts etc etc. and although these are satisfactory in the ordinary world, they are less than suitable for financial charting. Another important problem is import of financial statistics.These come in various forms which range from the very costly professional screen based inputs like Tellerate and Reuters, to your humble much under rated Teletext, your broker, and of course manual input. Without a good input system financial stock tracking is meaningless in Linux. There needs to be the capacity to not only input these stats but to connect them to point and figure charts automatically. This is essential since one cannot daily update stock figures by hand , the time taken to update hundreds of daily closing stock prices and together with the range on the day is obviously only feasible when incorporated into a computer programme. Yet another feature that is sadly lacking is the calculation of moving averages. Well, I suppose I ought to take that back, I use kspread to calculate my moving averages,but I have two problems, one , when the stats build up and become more than so much worth the amount of memory required goes up immensly,not that I mind that, since , well you only get what you pay for, and well calculating say a 200 day moving average takes more than 128Mb of SDRAM, If you want to be able to sweep down the calculation en block rather than individually calculate each cell . The second problem is that I cannot automatically input the stock stats. Another Manual job. I suppose what I am saying here is that the creation of a good stock trading programme in Linux requires the setting up of a team to create it, since it is a specialized feature and requires the support and combining of several other programme features as well, in much the same way as say xcdroast requires 6 or 7 other supporting programmes like cdrecord,cdparanoia, and mkisofs, etc etc. I have to say that out there in the wide world there is plenty of demand for such a programme and I am sure that it would do much to enhance the Linux worlds reputations and create good demand for Linux OS's that support it. Whether there is the will to do it I do not know. One of the problems that would be encountered is the fact that whatever exists currently to connect and trade with brokers is to the best of my knowledge written in C++ and NTFS , I openly admit I may be wrong here I am no programmer, but I suspect there will be compatibility issues to overcome. I don't think there are any standard formats for broker programmes, I haven't seem much of them, I prefer to do things by email, but , a good stock trader programme really connects directly to a broker and feeds of info gained thus by. Currently in the Country where I live(UK) no ordinary individual can afford the extortionate connection charges to be connected to the internets 24 hours a day, but in other parts of the world things are better, so broker programmers would be useful in those areas, but as time goes buy even luddite Countries like mine, will get there. I suspect brokers themselves would welcome the creation of some standardized programmes that they could acquire inexpensively and offer to their client base so that they can trade with them. Currently those that offer online trading systems have to get someone to write a programme for them, and of course this means that each broker has different requirements. John On Sunday 05 May 2002 17:50, you wrote: > Dear All, > > Does anyone trade stocks and track them using Linux? If so, how are > you doing this? Is there a totally free way to do this or at least > inexpensive? > > Thank you. > > Sincerely, > > Marcia -- John Richard Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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