Use the Ticker to Get Stock Information Without Any Unnecessary Bullshit
While the popular subreddit is in chaos and GameStop’s dreams of going to the moon are fading, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pay attention to the stock market. I wouldn’t recommend trading memes, but observing the overall health of a stock is never a bad thing.
I usually go to Yahoo Finance for this, but I admit I hate having to launch my browser just to look at stocks. That’s why I’m glad I stumbled upon Ticker , a handy command line program that you can use to get only prices and nothing more. It takes a little tweak to get started, but it’s ideal to leave work in the background while you go about your day.
To get started, download the precompiled binary for your operating system (“windows-amd64” for my 64-bit Windows PC). Unzip it anywhere on your system and then run Command Prompt (or Terminal) at the location of the program.
Just enter ticker -w followed by the names of the securities, separated by commas. So if you’re a big ticker -w gme,koss,expr,amc,bb,doge-usd,xrp-usd dying meme shares, you can type: ticker -w gme,koss,expr,amc,bb,doge-usd,xrp-usd
This will give you an output that looks like this by default:
You can also add additional flags to get more information about the promotions you are pursuing . For example, typing this …
ticker -w gme,koss,expr,amc,bb,doge-usd,xrp-usd —show-fundamentals —show-separator —show-summary
… gives you a much prettier (and more informative) layout:
For the obsessed among us, you can also create a .YAML file – a simple configuration file that is loaded when you load the app where you set the configuration options, the stocks you want, and the number of stocks you can buy (and at what price). This makes Ticker even more useful as you can track your portfolio right from the command line.
So, using the example on GitHub Ticker, I created a simple text file ticker.yaml in the same directory as the application. Then I renamed it to .ticker.yaml and launched Ticker without additional flags – just typing “ticker” on the command line when I am in the same directory as the application. This gave me the following:
Beautiful! My fake stocks are on the rise! While Ticker requires a little tweak to make it work best for you, it only takes a few minutes to get set up. And once you’ve done that, it’s much easier to just download a tiny app than a browser (and all your many tabs) to look at your stocks. Now go and get rich – by making a smart investment in an index fund that you have owned for 20 years.