Trader-Desk Application

While stock charting applications are ten a penny, it seems like every time you look at a stock chart you see a different picture. Especially when it is your broker: things always look great until the time you buy in and then you see things are all really downhill.

So we want a desk which shows us data we can believe, and allows us to very quickly view the data in lots of ways, at lots of time scales; we want to be live and interactive with our data.

Specifically, our requirements are

• Show full, at-a-glance, view of an entire market
• Instantly bring up all the details of any one company
• Have all data (ten years, all markets) on local machine, in a proper database, for speed
• Application must be lightning fast, we want to pan and zoom around the data to our heart’s content
  • Ultimately we want trading robots which can react to events super-fast
• Provide plug-in infrastructure for analysis modules, and ultimately for robot traders

The Project

We are a team of professional C++ Linux programmers and this has been a personal side project, and thus isn’t really designed for portability or ease of installation. But we have made an effort, and the application does include a wizard which will go some way towards getting your database set up correctly.

The requirements are specific and quite hard:

• gcc 9.3
  • Yep, this is written to C++20 standards with concepts and the fmt library in use.
• fmt
• mariadb
• gtkmm-3.0
• dmbcs-market-data-api
• An account at AlphaVantage (free); you will need to acquire an API key from that site and enter it at the bottom of the preferences dialog box in the trader-desk application

It has only been built on a Debian 10 (current stable) system. The file setup-hint.sh at the root of the distribution is a pseudo-script for configuring and installing into a clean-built Debian 10 machine. It is not expected that you would just run this blindly, but use it as a guide for manually setting your own system up at the command line; in particular it will inform you how to get the dependencies listed above.

Download

The dmbcs-trader-desk source code is managed with GIT (configured with autotools, built with make and a good C++20 compiler). Type

git clone https://rdmp.org/dmbcs/trader-desk.git  \
          dmbcs-trader-desk

at the command line to obtain a copy.

This repository also comes with some database pre-population data, so that you will have something interesting to look at as soon as you start the application running!

Documentation

As per above, build and installation instructions take the form of the setup-hint.sh pseudo-script included with the sources. The source is about 50% covered by Doxygen notes in the header files.

Real end-user documentation is non-existent right now. You should have had a look at the video above, and then you will be able to follow your instincts and find your own way around the application.

Contact

Please click here if you wish to send us a message.

Mailing list

If you would like to receive e-mail notices of matters arising about this application, you may request this through the contact form.

Contribution to development

We will happily consider contributions to the source code if you provide the address of a GIT repository we can pull from, and will consider all bug reports and feature requests.

The project is also posted on Github at Dale-M/dmbcs-trader-desk, and pull requests through that site will also be considered.

Donations

If you use this application please consider a bitcoin donation if you can. A small amount informs us that there is interest and that we are providing a useful service to the community; it will keep us motivated to continue to make open source software. Donations can be made by bitcoin to the address 1PWHez4zT2xt6PoyuAwKPJsgRznAKwTtF9.