Ask HN: Vim for Financial Charts, why hasn't anyone made this? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Vim for Financial Charts, why hasn't anyone made this?

7 pointsijidak7 comments

As developers, we know peak productivity means never touching a mouse.

I'm finding that thinkorswim and similar investing tools for retail traders, don't understand or share this ethos.

There are shortcuts for trading, but keyboard navigation for charting is primitive compared to what a typical dev IDE or even text editor would include.

I'm surprised none of us have implemented a Vim for financial charts. (e.g. scrolling, zooming, changing intervals and timeframes, etc.)

Any thoughts as to why?

Given the money flowing in finance, it seems like an app that could be very lucrative on its own. (e.g. not as a replacement for apps like think or swim, but as a companion.)

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If you want to make an app that is very lucrative, the Bloomberg terminal is the one to beat, not thinkorswim. The Bloomberg terminal is the standard in the trading world and it already has many shortcuts. It's been good enough for over 20 years and there is a lot of inertia and lack of need to change.

"scrolling, zooming, changing intervals and timeframes" is just not something that people need to do at a high frequency, and generally just using the mouse wheel is pretty fast and good enough.

> the Bloomberg terminal is the one to beat

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the current success of the Bloomberg terminal comes down mainly to the breadth of the data available in one system: varied news sources, and unique statistics and data sources all accessible in one set of tools. Basically everything you need to know what's going on financially in the world is accessible in that one platform. That aspect of Bloomberg is hard to beat. But the actual UI itself is probably very beatable if you just focused on the problem of making charts and data easily navigable with good shortcuts.

Breadth and speed, for platform and user.

BB has more and better data that is accessible before any competitors. That data is easily accessible and searchable without a mouse. Everything in the BB terminal has a short code to navigate there, everything has to have good tab and other movements.

The UI is successful because it makes it easy to do their job. Most investors are not doing technical signals on trading data to make their decisions. Charting is less important than people think.

But isn't the Bloomberg terminal moreso for professional investors?

I was thinking more retail day-traders.

It's strange, because technical analysis is so popular right now.

I feel like chart navigation (jumping around time intervals and periods) would be a very frequent use case.

And vim is all about movement. It's sort of a gamer's approach to keyboard entry.

And that concept seems perfect for navigating chart intervals and time, etc.

Technical analysis had always been popular with retail traders who think they can out perform based on technical analysis. This is a flaw in their thinking. If you want to build something for them, I wouldn't worry about building something like BB or for professional investors.

There are already very specialized trading platforms for the professional / semi-professional daytrader. For example, https://www.sierrachart.com. These platforms have all sorts of shortcuts and productivity workflows.

Adding Vim (what does this mean when we're not editing text) support to financial charts ... is not a tremendous value add.

Is there any demand for something like this? If so, what's the market/user base? Are there enough people who would actually or potentially use something like this to make it worth spending the time to create?

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