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Using Commoditized Computers Setups for Stock Trading?

Posted by Cliff on from the tux-goes-to-wall-street dept.

An anonymous reader asks: "Thanks to Walmart, TigerDirect, and Gnu/Linux, I can get computers at about $200 now. Thanks to Matrox, I have several multi-head video cards. Thanks to a hacker's convention last year, I have a truckload of monitors that haven't been put to use yet. I've been out of the financial markets since 1996. I'm itching to get back in now, especially since conditions will be very favorable shortly. Since I've lost my shirt in the markets already (most investors/traders loose their shirts at least once before striking it rich, and my beating was especially instructive), I'm now ready for better returns. Gnu/Linux is well known to support multiple monitor setups. I've seen 4 monitor setups per box in some financial firms, and I recently read a story on the National Weather Service using 3 monitor setups on another OSDN channel. I've also used a Quotrek trading monitor in the past, for monitoring stocks and other financials in real-time. This was before I was a penguinista. Now that I know a bit about Linux systems, I'd like to know the following: What Gnu/Linux applications can I use to monitor and/or process stocks, options, bonds, financial news, and other related information via low cost Gnu/Linux computing solutions, broadband, and multi-head video cards? Free software only, please"

"I'm not going back to paying hundreds of dollars per month like I did for my Quotrek (an FM receiver for stock quotes, possibly discontinued), or paying many hundreds for proprietary software that may not get the job done, or can't be modified or supported by the community. What free software applications do you use? What is a good multi-monitor layout? Any free software that picks up financial broadcast signals and decodes to a computer screen? Any slashdot tycoons want to help out other Slashdot readers?"

3 of 32 comments (clear)

  1. Numbers by sql*kitten · · Score: 4, Informative

    Fundamentally market data is just a stream of numbers, and once you have access to a stream, it's just a matter of deciding what you want to do with those numbers. There are plenty of Open Source apps for dealing with large blocks of numerical data, for example graphing it, running statistical algorithms over it, and so on, for example Octave and GNUPlot. There is even an open source library for quantitiative finance. And don't underestimate what you can do with just Perl/Tk. Postgres can take care of all your market history, and it's datatypes and query parser are sophisticated enough for data mining, or look at KDB.

    The problem you have is twofold. All this stuff is quite low level; you could build something as good as Reuters Dealing/3000 or a BridgeStation out of it, theoretically, but now we're talking about money, we're really talking about time. To integrate QuantLib with Octave with GNUPlot will take a substantial amount of work on your part, altho' once it was done, you could process a feed almost as well as any commercial trading desktop.

    The second problem is getting the feed. If you subscribe to say a Reuters data feed for real time streaming quotes, then the cost of a Reuters terminal is really negligible; you're paying for access to the feed. If you take the feed without the terminal, you still need libraries (like SSL) to actually use it in your own application, or you need something like Tibco eFinance to translate it into XML for you, and you also need something that can format messages back to your counterparty in a format they will accept, say FIX or FpML, - this is probably the easiest part to develop yourself, FIX handles all the instrument classes you're interested in. What you need is access to a feed that comes in a useful format, and which can be sourced for in a contract that doesn't involve taking a physical terminal anyway.

  2. More than two monitors by mcgroarty · · Score: 2, Informative
    Not exactly the original question, but for more than two monitors, your best bet is to grab ATI Radeon PCI cards for each additional head. You can get them at around $60 per head, as opposed to many times that for the Matrox 3 and 4 head solutions.

    If you're using DVI-D LCDs in the mix, don't grab nVidia PCI cards if you can avoid it. Their driver support is flaky at best when more than one card exists, and the unofficial (free) nVidia drivers only support DVI-D on the head the machine boots on.

  3. if you wanna roll your own .. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    ftp://64.226.245.10/mytrack.linux401.tar

    from a company called "Track data corporation"

    a friend of mine emailed me about it last year, their website http://www.mytrack.com seems to be down at the moment but his description:

    The SDK is a C library and an example test program.

    Once you have the test program compiled and a 30 day trial account setup then you can log into the their system and get streaming feeds on news and stock tickers as the trades happen if you sign up for the live feed or 20 min delay otherwise. To sign up online you also need to download the windows application but once the account is set up then it's not needed anymore.

    haven't tried it myself as I don't trade,
    and don't plan to trade.