The gist

Ticker is a terminal-based application created by Arunachalam Annarasappa for watching live stock and crypto prices and tracking personal investment positions. It solves the problem of needing a dedicated, lightweight tool to monitor financial markets without leaving the command-line interface. Users can view live quotes and track the performance of their holdings in a customizable, text-based environment.

What it does

Provide live price quotes for stocks and cryptocurrencies from sources like Yahoo Finance and Coinbase.
Track the value, cost basis, and gain/loss of personal investment positions.
Organize watched symbols and position lots into user-defined groups.
Customize the terminal display with options for showing fundamentals, tags, and separators.
Set custom sorting orders for quotes based on change percentage, value, or alphabetical order.
Export position data directly from the terminal into JSON or CSV files.

How it works

Ticker is an open-source, command-line application written in Go. Users interact with it by running the ticker command with flags or by creating a .ticker.yaml configuration file to define their watchlist and positions. The tool polls data from Yahoo Finance and streams from Coinbase, displaying live market information directly in the terminal. It can be installed via Homebrew, Winget, or pre-compiled binaries.

Best for

This tool is ideal for developers, system administrators, and financial enthusiasts who work primarily in a terminal and want a lightweight, at-a-glance view of their stock and crypto holdings without context switching.

Watch out for

Market data from the default source, Yahoo Finance, is not real-time and can have delays of 30 seconds or more. Real-time data is only available for spot assets streamed directly from Coinbase.