QTStalker – Open Source Trading software for Ubuntu 11.10

Qtstalker is a user friendly Technical Analysis package for GNU/Linux (and hence other Unix-like systems). Similar to commercial wares such as Metastock, Supercharts and Tradestation. Keeps to a lean, simple design for speed, portability, and low resource usage. Because it uses a plugin model, Qtstalker can easily be extended.
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Qtstalker is 100% free software, distributed under the terms of the GNU GPL. An active development community is continually adding new features. We appreciate your input towards creating a world-class GNU/Linux TA package.

Features

1)A point-and-click object-oriented graphical user interface.
2)Chart types include line, bar and candlestick.
3)Customizable colors. Logarithmic and linear arithmetic scaling. Scale to screen.
4)Indicators plugins include MACD, MAs, Bollinger Bands, RSI, and dozens more. Provides access to the TA-Lib library of common functions.
5)A simple scripting facility to create custom indicators. This powerfully enables combination of different plots in one indicator and combining of other indicators and calculations.

6)A special indicator “ExScript” enables external scripts to pass indicator data in.
An “Indicator Summary” tool shows a table of all indicator parameters from all active indicators. It also writes the data to XML output for use by external programs.

7)Chart drawing objects: trendlines, buy/sell arrows, horizontal and vertical lines, fibonacci retracement lines, text and cycles.
8)Quote plugins download data from online sources such as Yahoo, CME, NYBOT.
9)Data import plugins for plain-text CSV files.
10)The “Plugin” architecture for quotes and indicators enables easy future extensibility.
11)Minute, daily, weekly and monthly chart compression options.
12)Various data classes to support for investment types such as stocks, futures, indices, ratios and spreads.
13)A back testing function allowing indicator performance tests using actual trading data.
14)A very basic portfolio manager. Good for tracking open positions. (Suggestions welcome.)
15)A Scanner that can scan the qtstalker database for charts that meet a user defined criteria.
16)A paper trading mode enabling users to practice trading without risking capital.

How to Install QT Stalker
1)Go to Synaptic Package Manger in Ubuntu
2)Select the Package QT Stalker
3)Press Apply

Alternatively you can download QT Tracke for Linuxr here too

Download QT Staker Debian Packages

Hint for Ubuntu / Debian users

You need to install these packages before:

-build-essential (meta package for compiler etc.)
-libdb4.4-dev (for Berkely)
-qt3-dev-tools (for qmake)
-libqt3-mt-dev (this will also select much more packages to install, don’t be afraid)

Install TA-Lib

Since version 0.34 of Qtstalker you must install TA-Lib separately before you install Qtstalker itself. In previous versions, TA-Lib was included in the Qtstalker source tree, but not now. You can download the source of TA-Lib e.g. with the command…

wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/ta-lib/ta-lib-0.4.0-src.tar.gz

…entered in your terminal. Unpack the downloaded file, cd into the extracted folder and compile/install TA-Lib with the sequence

1. ./configure
2. make
3. make install (as root)
4. There may also need to modify something if an error like this appears when you start Qtstalker …/usr/local/bin/qtstalker: error while loading shared libraries: libqtstalker.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directoryTo fix this add /usr/local/lib to your /etc/ld.so.conf file and run ldconfig -v (as root).

If you installed TA-Lib at a non-standard location, then edit the Qtstalker “configure” file (e.g. “INCLUDEPATH += /opt/local/include/ta-lib“).

Also ensure that the ‘ta-lib-config‘ program is available on your $PATH

Install Qtstalker

For Linux users

• Ensure that your shell QTDIR environment variable is set to point to the location of the root Qt directory. This setting is usually something like this: ‘export QTDIR=/usr/lib/qt‘ or something similar to this. Failure to set this properly will result in make errors.
• Unpack the Qtstalker source.
• ./configure (this will create the Makefile)
• make
• make install (as root)

If you get errors about undefined symbols when you start qtstalker, then add /usr/local/lib to your /etc/ld.so.conf file and run ldconfig -v (as root).

Screen Shots

In the next post we will see how to configure Yahoo Intraday and Yahoo Historical charts using QT Stalker