What is jStock
jStock is a tool for technical analysis of stocks written in Java.
jStock draws logarithmic charts (candlesticks) based on daily open, high, low and close for a stock. Both daily and weekly charts are supported as well as some technical indicators. Volume is also drawn. Data files can be read from directly from internet sources or from downloaded files.
Notes and userdrawn lines are stored in a database. The use of the database is optional, i. e. all the basic functions works without it.
Important design parameters have been to maximise the area for the candlestick chart and minimise the user interactions for daily use.
A couple of screenshots:
The feature list is constantly growing, and I find jStock quite usefull myself. So what can jStock do?
- Display a logarithmic daily chart
- Display a logarithmic weekly chart
- Draws volume
- Auto scaling
- A window for writing notes (require db)
- Draw trendlines
- Draw a RSI graph
- Draw MACD indicator
- Draw moving average (MA & EMA) indicators
- Autoloading of stocks on the watchlist at startup (require db)
- Files from Yahoo and Netfonds (or similar) are supported directly. There is also a more generic file reader, but it's currently rather slow.
Planned features include:
- Rulebased generation of positive or negative signals from technical indicators (will require db)
- Store all stock data in database
- Internal db solution
- Other technical indicators - if you are interested in a particular indicator let me know.
- Update documentation
As for the planned feature list it is by no way final. What I do depends mostly on what I find important and what is most fun to implement. However, when I have started on something, I try to finish it.
jStock is released as open source under the revised BSD licence. The source code is included in the download, the source is put inside the jstock.jar file so in order to view it the jar file has to be unpacked.
Part of the reason why I'm releasing it is that I don't have enough time to implement all the features I want to. So if if anybody wants to contribute, please send me a mail at jstock (at) exponto.com
Very short about technical analysis
It's said that technical analysis is a tool for small players to know what the big ones are up to. In the book "Technical analysis of stock trends" Robert D. Edwards and John Magee has described several patterns in stock charts that may (please note the may, no one gives any guarantees here) say something about how a stock will behave in the future. The idea behind it then is that if you by stocks where patterns indicates that it is more likely for a stock to go up than down, you would, in the long run, do better than the average. If you also have rules for minimising your losses (yeah, they will come), you should be able to do well. Experience (mine as well as others) have shown that taking small losses will save you a lot of money compared to closing your eyes and hoping that it will go over by itself.
If you are new to technical analysis please give yourself some time to learn before you bet to much money on it. For learning I would recommend the above mentioned "Technical analysis of stock trends" by Robert D. Edwards and John Magee. It is a classic from 1948 and is still reprinted, I bought mine from Amazon. See also my external links page.
It's all in the license, but just to be sure: The application is provided "as is", and may contain errors. Use it at your own risk. Neither Ex Ponto nor the copyright holders takes any responsability, what soever, for action taken as a consequence of using this application.
History
The development of jStock started in 2001. It was an attempt to find an usefull application to teach myself Java. It started out as modification to code examples from others, but as I grew more comfortable with Java and the application evolved, more and more was reimplemented, and by the time the first "usefull" version was finished most of the code was my own. However, due to the way it started the user interface was rather primitive, and I decided reimplement the user interface.
The reimplementation took a lot more time than I had assumed. But early in 2003 the new interface was finished with the same functionality as the old, and I have now started to implement new features.
