Over the past few years I’ve been using Ubuntu, one of the types of programs I found ‘lacking’ in synaptic was stock market programs to help manage your portfolio, and stock charting programs.  After taking another look around this week, I’m pleased to report back that I’ve found a few worth mentioning, that others may wish to also check out.  Happy trading!

Visit aiotrade.org and try out their java program.    All I needed to  do was download the zip file and  extract it, and right click on the file  aiotrade in the bin folder to set the properties, permissions , execute checkbox to ‘allow’.     My first glance at it leaves me quite impressed at the quality of the  program.   After adding a symbol to the list, it automatically downloads the data from the net and displays a beautiful looking  chart,  with 20 technical indicators available.  It appears to have support for real time charting through IB if you trade with them.  It gives a large set of trend line drawing options , tabs to quickly switch from daily to weekly or monthly time periods, and zoom in or out with the keyboard.   Possibly the best linux stock trading software I’ve seen yet?  If only it had a portfolio manager… sigh.

SMTM is found in synaptic, and is launched with ALT-f2 smtm command.  It’s quite easy to use to manage your stock portfolio.  I found the font was set to a messed up bitmap, and ugly to look at.  It took me a few tries to figure out the date of purchase should be entered in YYYY-MM-DD format.  A right click on the stock and it loads a chart.. well it *should* but doesn’t always.

Grism is quite promising, user friendly, attractive to look at,  but I’ve often found it buggy and a work in progress being only at version 0.81.  Eventually I hope the finished product will be ready to install in synaptic.  One of the best up and coming!  Something ubuntu desparately needs!