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We are using C# .NET.

We're looking for a method to display live streaming 1-min financial stock charts.

Need: - Candlesticks - Zoom/pan - The chart scrolling in real time as it receives streaming data

Woud like: - A method to print metadata on the chart (buy/sell points, etc)

We don't mind paying for it, so any recommendation goes!

Contango
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  • I appreciate that there is some sort of need for things like this, but am I the only one a little bit creeped out by it? Like, maybe we should collectively make capital allocation decisions on a time scale slightly longer than 1 minute? No offense to the OP personally, and I do appreciate that sometimes this type of stuff is important. – Doug McClean Jul 13 '09 at 23:54
  • He's not even necessarily waiting a whole minute: his graph shows points every minute but that might be from multiple realtime quotes within that minute. – hughdbrown Jul 20 '09 at 00:54
  • How did you get on with RadControls? – Hans Rudel Oct 27 '12 at 14:05
  • @Doug McClean: 1 minute gathering more information about market than 15 minutes in same period of time, then why not using better precision data? – Svisstack Aug 22 '13 at 10:24
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    As owner of Gigasoft, readers researching financial charting please see our [demo of financial .net wpf charting](http://www.gigasoft.com) Well-worked logic in date-time handling, multiple y axes, exporting and more ideal for financial needs. Real-time and or historical uses. – Robert Jun 09 '14 at 16:31
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    You may try Nevron Chart for .NET - it has a full range of stock charting features, zooming and panning and scrolling - https://www.nevron.com/products-dot-net-chart-overview.aspx –  Sep 02 '14 at 15:04

6 Answers6

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My research eventually led to these packages:

* StockChartX WPF
      o http://www.freedownloadscenter.com/Programming/Misc__Programming_Tools/Stock_Chart_X_Financial_Chart_Component.html
      o Rating: B.
      o Pros:
            + Very powerful
            + Nice looking
            + Has a WPF version, see http://www.modulusfe.com/stockchartxwpf/
            + Real-time automatic technical analysis updating
      o Cons:No scroll with the mouse (for non-WPF version, WPF version has mouse scrolling)
      o Cost: US$350 (AciveX) to US$529 (WPF)
      o Notes: StockChartX uses a function named AppendValue (series name, date, value). You actually "push" data into StockChartX, so it does not matter where the data is coming from, be it a database, text file, XML file, or real time tick-by-tick data - it all goes into StockChartX the same way, simple, quick, and easy! 
* Dundas
      o Pros:
      o Video demonstration on charting (4 videos): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaDHjUTri7c
* NetAdvantage
      o Pros:
            + incredibly powerful
            + supports financial charts including, Gantt and radar charts
      o Cost: >US$700
      o Video demonstration: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BW7pBNF51Mo
      o Video overview: http://searchsoftwarequality.techtarget.com/video/0,297151,sid92_gci1356440,00.html
      o Video tutorial on samples: http://www.infragistics.com/videos/get-started/intro-to-samples.aspx
      o Video tutorial on charting: http://www.infragistics.com/FullMovie.aspx?id=3476
* AnyChart
      o Supports financial charts
      o US$500
      o For OHLC chart tutorial, see http://anychart.com/products/anychart/docs/users-guide/index.html?Chart-Types.html
* Financial Charting Component (for .NET 2.0) v1.0
      o NumeralTechnology
      o http://www.numeraltechnology.com/shop/
      o Rating: C
      o Cost: US$350
      o Gallery: see http://www.numeraltechnology.com/shop/custom.aspx?recid=14
* TeeChart .NET
      o http://www.steema.com/ordering/order_tchnet_n.shtml
      o Rating: Yet to try.
      o Cost: US$700
      o http://demos.telerik.com/wpf/
* RadControls for WPF
      o Rating: A
      o Pros: very nice, does everything we want
      o Cost: US$999
* Chart Control .NET
      o http://www.chartcontrol.net/Chart_gal.htm
* NextWave Chart for WPF
      o http://www.nextwavesoft.com/products/nextwave-chart-for-wpf
* Barchart WPF
      o http://www.syncfusion.com
      o Cons: doesnt seem to be specialized for financial functions
* DevExpress
      o http://www.devexpress.com/Products/NET/Controls/Charting/screenshot_gallery.xml
      o Pros: design wizard that allows you to customize charts with the greatest of ease with onscreen design, see:
            + http://www.devexpress.com/Products/NET/Controls/Charting/design.xml
      o Cons:
            + None.
      o Cost:
            + $249 for an individual component, or $1999 for the full enterprise version
* Super Graph Library
      o http://www.supergraphlibrary.com/

Update:

http://www.componentart.com/products/dv/

Contango
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  • ... if you can suggest any more I'd be curious! – Contango Jul 13 '09 at 23:30
  • Infragistics? Can't guarantee that it is good for realtime data but it is a top .NET UI library not mentioned here. http://www.infragistics.com/dotnet/netadvantage/wpf/xamchart.aspx#Gallery – hughdbrown Jul 20 '09 at 00:57
  • We use DevExpress, and I have to say, it makes everything so much easier and quicker to develop! – Irfy Oct 13 '09 at 08:37
5

Visiblox has great support for styling and for financial charts, as well as being a high performance component.

They have an example on the website of a Live Streaming Chart which sounds like exactly like what you are looking for, and they have WPF and Silverlight versions.

You can see a performance comparison blog post between Visiblox and some other popular charts here.

Chris Grant
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  • I've been testing Visiblox for a while I really think they have a poor performance. Showing series of 10.000 points takes a while, and with 5 or more 10.000 point series the Chart component is on its knees. – Ignacio Soler Garcia Oct 08 '12 at 14:43
  • It sounds to me like you may be doing something wrong then. I've successfully rendered around 15 million points and with suitable filtering strategies and performance was still pretty decent. Have you been in touch to see if you are optimising how you display the data? – Chris Grant Oct 09 '12 at 08:03
  • I don't want to filter data as the charts will be used for high frequency trading and filtering it introduces changes on the shapes. At the end, if you filter your 15 million points to 1.000 points Visiblox is displaying 1000 points so that's probably why Visiblox is performing good. – Ignacio Soler Garcia Oct 09 '12 at 08:33
  • That's true of every WPF chart - it's just that Visiblox doesn't enable the filtering by default where others do. There are plenty of ways to filter without changing the shape (e.g. filtering points which fall on the same pixel or within 2 pixels). That said streaming 50K points should be fine with their new raster series without filtering - it should render about 20-30 FPS. – Chris Grant Oct 09 '12 at 09:16
  • Yes, I saw RasterSeries some days ago but I can't find any decent documentation about them. I'll give them a try, I'm curently using LineSeries. – Ignacio Soler Garcia Oct 09 '12 at 14:33
  • By the way, I'm having the problem loading the initial data, after that the refresh is good (I'm adding a bunch of points/sec) but loading the inital 50K points can take up to a minute. – Ignacio Soler Garcia Oct 09 '12 at 14:39
  • Have you tried profiling your code to see why it is taking so long? Are you adding a single data point at a time for example? I was doing so but then changed to AddRange instead and that improved performance a lot. I've definitely had a chart with more than 50k points and start up was within a second. – Chris Grant Oct 09 '12 at 15:46
  • let us [continue this discussion in chat](http://chat.stackoverflow.com/rooms/17793/discussion-between-chris-grant-and-somos) – Chris Grant Oct 10 '12 at 07:31
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The ASP.NET Charting Control provides advanced financial charting graphs. Scott Gu provided a really nice overview along with valuable links.

If you are familiar and happy with Dundas (as noted previously) you are going to like the FREE ASP.NET Charting Control as well. Why? Microsoft acquired Dundas Data Visualization Intellectual Property in April 2007 and is integrating this technology in different Microsoft products.

Review Scott Gu's post and Download the Microsoft Chart Controls Samples project to see what ASP.NET Charting Control can do.

I should note that I create financial report for the better part of 5 years and we used Dundas throughout. They has a good, flexible product but since it isn't free and MS now has the same offering, I would go with MS.

Best of luck.

Ben Griswold
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  • Interesting - cheers for the info. I'm not sure how it works - if we're programming an application in C#, can we even use ASP .NET components? Isn't ASP for web development? – Contango Jul 10 '09 at 23:25
  • I'm sure he just assumed that you were developing a web application. Dundas itself has regular Windows forms components. – Halvard Jul 11 '09 at 08:49
  • Yes, I did incorrectly assume you were developing for the web. Sorry about that. That being said, I (like @Halvard) would recommend you give Dundas a shot. Here's their financial charting gallery: http://www.dundas.com/Gallery/Flash/Chart/FinancialStock/index.aspx – Ben Griswold Jul 11 '09 at 14:34
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    The MS Charting Control is available for WinForms As well. check out here: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/mschart – Colin Jul 14 '09 at 10:11
  • Sweet! Thanks for the comment, Colin. – Ben Griswold Jul 14 '09 at 15:47
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Dundas has really nice looking graphs. We are happy with them (at the company I work for), although we haven't tried out streaming data to it. You can evaluate the full product for free, but a license cost money (but as you said that doesn't matter much to you).

Halvard
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Not sure if you need this for web or desktop app. For web there's a very powerful amCharts Stock chart control. It's flash based and you can feed data to it from .NET by just outputing it in CSV. WPF version of the control is coming in a couple of months.

Update: WPF version of amCharts Stock Chart is now available.

Alan Mendelevich
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If you are doing WPF or Silverlight, VisiFire is an option.

A free WinForms option is ZedGraph, but I believe you would have to do some work to get real time updates out of it.

Totty
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  • Visifire looks great, but it doesn't seem to have anything tailored for financial services. Thanks for the comment anyway! – Contango Jul 10 '09 at 23:28
  • Visifire supports CandleStick charts with zooming and panning and also receives streaming data. http://www.visifire.com/silverlight_candlestick_charts_gallery.php – sharmila Jul 20 '12 at 11:07