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Comment by kruxigt | Hacker News Reader

Is anyone really using any of these stock trackers (including those built in in OSX etc? I think the whole idea is broken. This is why:

If you are interested enough to regularly check the price of certain stocks and indices you know that the most important thing is that the shown price is CORRECT. And you know that the most trustworthy way to get a correct price is to go directly to the largest brokers and the largest and most trusted portals like Investing.com and Marketwatch.

On the other hand if you don't care that much. Why the hell would you like to have a special application for checking when you could as well go to any of the above?

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I feel like it's an excuse to write a CLI app in your favorite language. I dig it; tempted to clone it in python.

This was my thought too- it seems like a really fun and clean and data-driven coding project, whether it's actually useful or not

Nothing wrong with that! :)

If you're a long-hold investor who lives in the terminal, it's perfectly fine. Plus watching GME crash in ASCII is entertaining.

I would't call it perfectly fine. It's still not trustworthy enough. You would certainly want to double check it, which in turn makes it rather unnecessary in the first place.

I typically keep a Windows VM running for the main purpose of using my brokers very powerful trading desktop application. While it is very useful and can do all sorts of calculations & graphing, it is kind of slow and the UI is a little cumbersome. The number of clicks to add a stock to a watchlist is very high, etc. In comparison, it takes 1 button to add a stock to mop [1] and I can keep it in a 'dropdown' terminal window controlled by a keyboard shortcut.

Unless you are a HF trader, you probably only need the stock price within a few minutes unless you are about to place a trade. (And typically all these terminal stock tickers are doing is scraping these sites anyway so the data is about the same.) Therefore, during the day I can watch stocks in the comfort of my terminal using mop [1] (or this if this has more features and is as easy to use), and if anything strikes my eye I can then go to my stock trading terminal and watch things more precisely.

I also do have a custom search engine that can open any stock ticker to finviz.com but I'd rather not have to have yet another account on some random website that either has distracting ads and/or pushes me to pay for more features.

There is a very large UX vs features trade off when it comes to anything stock related so it makes sense to use multiple tools.

Thank you for your post, adding the reference:

[1] https://github.com/mop-tracker/mop

What’s the desktop application you are using? Sounds interesting

If I had to guess, the Fidelity Active Trader Pro app.

It's a pretty handy app, that seems to be constantly up to date, but it's garbage on Mac, so I setup a PC laptop next to my main setup so I can have it running. Still a bit finicky on PC, but way better.

I play with fake money, in a Discord server with a bot we made and a few friends. Sure, I'm probably not the norm, but I find them useful :).

This might be the only real use case haha

You need an account with a broker to see prices with sub-minute resolution. If you need that, you likely trade seriously, and have more serious tools from a broker or two anyway.

But if all you want is to watch trends, not do HFT, being even 5 minutes late is fine. Even just looking at how a day went after hours is fine.

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