FreeMarket

Robert Graham Merkel rgmerk@mira.net
Sat, 2 Jun 2001 20:27:53 +1000


On Sat, 02 Jun 2001 16:03:54 Linas Vepstas wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 02, 2001 at 12:40:44PM +1000, Robert Graham Merkel was heard
> to remark:
> > 
> > On Sat, 02 Jun 2001 03:02:54 Patrick Lanphier wrote:
> > > What are people currently using on Linux in place of say TradeStation
> or
> > > TS2000?  Thank you.
> > > 
> > > Patrick Lanphier
> > > The Artemis Group
> > > http://www.artemisgroup.com
> > > 
> 
> TC2000
> 
> > There are some free tools that have been developed for stock analysis
> 
> please see www.gnucash.org/links.phtml and choose the 'trading'
> category.
> 
Thanks Linas, /me should have remembered to point people at that.  

> You may want to contact the folks at 
> http://www.freemarket-project.org/
> 
> 
> > (for instance, there is a graphing program called gstalker available),
> 
> I've invited the author for gstalker to come play with us, but 
> he doesn't want to.  And guppi is not yet ready for this sort of stuff.
> 
> > Of course, one might point out that this is a gap in offerings for
> Linux,
> 
> Well, many of the basic features of TC2000 are not all that 
> overwhelming, and I've long been hoping that the gnucash report
> system would be up to the task.  It seems like its almost there,
> except that the pricedb support is still very weak, and of course guppi 
> needs a lot of polish.  Writing code to do 90-day moving averages, beta,
> and the other mumbo jumbo names  is not hard.
> 
> Side note:
> when I first started with gnucash 4-5 years ago, what I was going to 
> do with it was to have a sophisticated portfolio monitoring tool.
> However, I kept getting side-tracked ...
> 
> I still think this is an interesting thing to do, and if we could 
> modularize gnucash a bit more, then this woudn't be so out of the
> question.
> 
> I don't think its a particularly unreachable goal.  GnuCash now
> has a lot of the infrastructure needed to pull this off.  Its a lot
> easier than starting from scratch.
>
One thing that a program like this demands, as I understand it,
 is the ability to get arbitrary bits of stock information quickly 
and without fuss.  In the commercial offerings, a (paid-for) 
subscription to their data service is necessary to make any real 
use of the programs, I gather.  Hmmm. . . . 


-- 
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Robert Merkel	                           rgmerk@mira.net

Go You Big Red Fire Engine
-- Unknown Audience Member at Adam Hills standup gig
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