Traders' Roundtable

Hi,

I'm thinking about buying charting component to use in my engine, but can't seem to find too many online. I've heard of TeeCharts by Steema Software - but they are quite expensive. Does anyone have any opinions or reviews to offer on their product (or any others)?

Depending on the language you are using, there are many more packages available for more popular and easy accessible languages.

I settled for TeeCharts and have been happy with that choice. I only use a small subset of the component and have no need for most of their "financial" support apart from plotting bars (I think a charting component should be used for just that and not be used for calculations etc). I'd recommend you to try to pin down exactly what it is that you want to accomplish and then try to do some of it using their trial version before purchasing a license. In that way you will get a feel for what can be done and how to do it.

There's a drawback if you're using C++, since all their docs and most examples are for other languages (but you can download extra material from their website). I'd recommend you to build everything you need to access the component as an external library so you only have to bother once. This is surprisingly not supplied from Steema Software, but does not take very long time to do.

I have not had any need for help with TeeCharts but from what I understand their support is excellent, even during evaluation.

Edit: My comments are for TeeChart Pro ActiveX v7. There are other versions nowadays ... .

cheers,
tobbe

Tobbe,

Thanks for the input! You are right, I should have been more specific - my drug of choice is C#. I have already developed a charting component for myself, but considering that it doesn't form part of my core engine development, I am thinking about "outsourcing" it to a 3rd party package. My requirements are pretty much consistent with what anyone else using a sim engine might want. Guess I'll download their trial version and check it out sometime.

Do you have any other vendors that you'd suggest looking at ?

I fully agree, visualization does not form an integral part of the simulation engine (but it is still important). I'm even considering completely splitting the two and allow for different frontends to the simulation engine backend. I'd then be free to pick something more pleasant to code the front end in .

When it comes to charting I considered Chart FX (very expensive) and the Dundas charting package (more expensive than TeeChart), since I had heard good things about them and they are popular around here. Evaluating these kits takes time and I found TeeChart ok so I didn't look further. The vendors all seem to sell only full packages so one ends up paying for maybe 80% that is never used.

I didn't spend very much time looking for less pricey or open source alternatives, but I'm sure they're out there. It would be nice to know what TradingBlox uses ... (anyone from development listening in?).

The main reason for me to "outsource" visualization was to save time - even if charting isn't that hard to understand, I find it quite complex to code, especially when you want to add new chart types (like heat maps) or mix different chart types, scale in different ways, print charts etc.

Please let us know what you find and choose (if you do).

cheers,
tobbe

Check out ChartDirector .

cheers,
tobbe

Thank You!

Some very useful links. Will check those out in detail and post my experiences on the board. I have also "isolated" my engine from the charting component. Even though it is not too complex to build something from ground up - I'm not looking towards replicating Excel here - I wouldn't mind if someone took the pain away for a few $$$.

I wonder what kind of charts VeriTrader has? Do they have any embedded functionality - such as zooming, drawing trendlines, displaying info as the mouse hovers over a point etc? I haven't found anything else on the boards that indicates that there may be.

TB is a tool for system trading and it doesn´t intend to be a second tradestation or metastock. It is nice that TB has some graphics, but you can´t draw a trendline.

Example screenshot is in the TB help file:

I use R for visualization. Let the simulator spit out the data and load it into R. R also has very good data manipulation capabilities and a quant lib.

http://www.r-project.org/