looking for stock charting component [closed]

Question

i am writing a financial WPF desktop application and i am looking for a component that would allow me to display (and print) OHLC, candlestick, and possibly other types of financial charts. I need to be able to embed custom graphics into the chart, i mean graphics such as extra lines, additional charts, etc. the component needs to support overlaying of different chart types as well. and it has to look professional, unlike these 3D charts that I have seen on codeplex. any help would be appreciated.

thanks konstantin

Softspoken

Hi Konstantin, I've updated my answer... I hope you find these libraries/components useful. – Cirri

As owner of Gigasoft, if researching stock financial chart, see Gigasoft's Wpf Financial Charting for a quick 7 meg demo download guaranteed to impress. Quality date-time axes, multi y axes, and overall image construction intelligence wrapped in a Direct2D, Direct3D, DirectX11 next generation charting engine. – Cyclic

Disclosure - I work for Nevron. You can consider Nevron Chart for Wpf (nevron.com), which includes OHLC, candlestick, Kagi, Renko etc. as well build in financial indicators. The control supports hardware acceleration and is exceptionally fast. – Earthwork

LightningChart (www.arction.com) provides hardware accelerated DirectX9 and DirectX11 charts, optimized for real-time data. It comes with data scrolling features no other in the charting industry can match. No need for resampling the data. Hundreds of scrolling data lines / mountain charts on several monitors - possible :-) [I'm CTO of LightningChart] – Eleonoreeleoptene

Answer 1

Updated

Here are some recommendations:

• Visfire is free.
• StockChart SL VERY professional but it costs $2000-3000 USD.
• ZedGraph is also free, but it's just C#.

I'm a sucker for free stuff, but if you're working for a company that has extra cash to shell out at the most fancy stuff out there, then you can try StockChart SL, otherwise it looks like Visfire should do it for you.

Cirri

It seems Visifire is not free anymore, but it's trial only. They've changed the license early 2011. – Tetrafluoroethylene

StockChart is a waste of money, its performance is hillariously low if you need any manner of quick updates. (We've bought it and then had to look at the alternative, because the Support was saying it's by design and there're no refunds for the source code license.) – Opposite

StockCharX was updated last week with double buffering and caching. It is super fast, maybe 10 times faster since that last update. The C++ version of StockChartX is the fastest, but now the WPF version is almost as fast as C++. – Intercessory

Answer 2

Full Disclosure: I am the owner and tech lead on the SciChart project, so without doubt I'm biased!

You can also check out SciChart, which is a commercial WPF & Silverlight stock chart control built with financial users in mind. It supports

• Candlestick, OHLC
• Line, Step-Line
• Mountain
• Column
• Scatter
• Band series, Step-Band Series
• Annotations such as line, arrow, custom markers
• Multiple linked charts with more chart types being prepared in the v2.0 release.

As far as performance / speed goes, it's pretty fast!, using the same low-level bitmap rendering as you find in Windows Forms charts.

It is being used in MTPredictor v7.5 (an Elliot Wave trading platform) who have tested it in live markets with several monitors and several charts all open, all ticking simultaneously. You can see a webinar of MTPredictor running SciChart here. Note MTP run a webinar once per day and videos are all on youtube.

We had a trial user contact us with a youtube demo showing scichart in real-time trading application, in a live market with multiple ticks per second being pushed to the chart.

On our website we have several live demos showing real-time financial charting and multi-pane financial charting. Note on the multi-pane demo you can switch to EURUSD and Hourly and show 100,000 bars right back to the year 2000 of the EURUSD continuous contract.

• With this demo showing, click to pan, or select Zoom in the menu and click to zoom
• Then, double click to zoom to extents
• notice how fast & smooth the chart is even with 100,000 OHLC bars.

We also have an annotations demo (drag to zoom, double click to reset zoom), as well as some internal stress-test demo which loads and displays 2,000,000 candlesticks in under 500ms on a quad-core 2.3GHz i7 laptop. If speed is important to you please email us and request it if you want the source code for the stress-test.

It is a commercial chart (not free), but we aim to provide excellent support and fix bugs in a timely manner.

Hope this helps!

Plateau

Answer 3

@SciChart: I like your chart for scientific charting but like StockChart SL from Modulus more for financial apps. It looks like finance is their niche. Based on the trial versions that I've seen it's pretty good performance and tons of finance related features. It looks like the price has come down to $500 also. But again your chart is better for science stuff. My company has a license for both your chart and the Modulus StockChart SL chart. We use both.

Cyclic

Answer 4

Welcome to 2013. Highstock is proabably the most powerful free-for-personal-use JavaScript stock charting library you can find.

Check out the demos at http://www.highcharts.com/stock/demo/flags-shapes

Triggerhappy