rticker is a command-line based stock ticker application. It is capable of retrieving and displaying information about stocks (including ETFs), indexes, futures, currency pairs (forex), and option contracts. rticker is also capable of showing profit/loss for open positions.

rticker runs on any system with Ruby 1.8.7 or greater installed, including Ruby 1.9.

Example configuration files are in the gem in the data/ directory. The user can copy this directory to their home directory and rename it to .rticker.d and then make a soft link from ~/.rticker.d/all.ticker to ~/.rticker. rticker first loads its configuration from ~/.rticker if no command line options are passed to it.

gem unpack rticker
cp -R rticker-1.1.0/data ~/.rticker.d
ln -sf ~/.rticker.d/all.ticker ~/.rticker
rm -rf rticker-1.1.0

Usage options:

% rticker --help
Usage: rticker [-onh] [-d SECS] [-p host:port] [-f FILE] ... [SYMBOL[,DESC[,COUNT@PRICE]]] ...
    -o, --once                       Only display ticker results once then quit
    -n, --no-color                   Do not use colors when displaying results
    -f, --file FILE                  Specify a file that lists ticker entries, one per line
    -d, --delay SECS                 How long to delay in SECS between each update
    -p, --proxy HOST:PORT            Host and port of HTTP proxy to use.
    -h, --help                       Display this screen

This application is also capable of using an HTTP proxy. Simply pass --proxy HOST:POST to the program.

The basic way of configuring rticker entries is as follows: SYMBOL,DESC,COUNT@PRICE. SYMBOL is a ticker symbol, such as AAPL. DESC is any descriptive text and is optional. For example, Apple Inc. You can specify COUNT@PRICE which is a position held by you. For example, if you own 100 shares of AAPL purchased at 234.50, you can express this with 100@234.50. If you provide information about an open position, rticker will display your current profit/loss. Use a negative COUNT to express a short position. So altogether, an example invocation might be:

% rticker 'AAPL,Apple Inc.,100@234.50'

You may of course put this information in a file such as ~/.rticker with one ticker entry per line.

Please note that rticker gets its information from both Google Finance and Yahoo Finance. Google is preferred as its data is closer to real-time and its platform is more stable. However, Yahoo provides access to far more information and is used where Google lacks. Yahoo is used for futures, currency pairs, and option contracts. For equities, Google is used by default unless the ticker SYMBOL is preceded by a carat (e.g., ^AAPL) in which case Yahoo will be used.

To learn how to fetch currency pairs, option contracts, futures, etc., please look at the example configs.

I haven't had the time to write proper documentation. This is a very complete and useful application, but learning how to use it can be difficult without docs. If anyone messages me expressing interest, I will reply with useful information. Contacting me will also give me an incentive to write real documentation.