Financial Charting

I have worked on a number of financial charting projects, using my flash charting library (see separate entry, and some demos of it).

As one example I developed a sophisticated charting tool for a financial industry start-up. The chart styles include candlestick, bar, area, line, point and figure, market profile. Analysis tools include RSI, stochastics, bollinger bands, volume. This flash application was interactive and it was possible to draw trendlines, gann lines, and fibonacci lines. A live news feed was also included.

In addition to the front-end I wrote the PHP back-end server for this same project. It had the following primary tasks:

• Handle requests from hundred of simultaneous clients, getting data from the database (Microsoft SQL Server), pre-processing results then sending the data to the client. Flash XML sockets were used for communication.
• Receive real-time data from four different exchanges and simultaneously update both the historic data and push the latest data to clients that are watching those symbols.
• Import huge quantities of historical data, from raw tick data.

The entire system was very portable. The back-end ran on either Windows using Microsoft SQL Server, or on linux using MySQL. The front-end ran on all Flash 6 platforms: Windows, Mac, Linux.

Back-End Development Thoughts: Some of the challenges were coping with the enormous amounts of data the markets can generate. Not just historical data, but also the live ticks when the markets get busy. I was shocked to discover Microsoft SQL Server ran more slowly than MySQL on Linux despiting being on a considerably higher spec machine. Another challenge was differences in the way different exchanges distribute their data (not just syntax: the concepts of things like volume vary).