Free Software for Stock Investors: JStock

Talking about investment, most of us invest directly or indirectly in stock market. During this time of information age, you are always looking for the easier route to get things done.

If you directly invest in stock market, here is good news for you. I was introduced to a free software that can manage your stock portfolio. This software called JStock was created by a talented local programmer, Yan Cheng Cheok. You can download this free stock market software JStock at

Download JStock: http://jstock.sourceforge.net

Yan has got his name on newspaper, search engine and blog because of JStock. If you are looking for a programmer to materialize your next big idea, please consider Yan.

I tried JStock recently and found it very interesting indeed.

History of JStock

KCLau: Can you briefly tell the story of creating JStock? What’s the motivation behind the creation of JStock?

The birth of JStock began when I received an order from a local stock course instructor, to develop customized stock market software for his courses. However, after completing the development, he broke the contract and refused to pay for the completion of the project.

Instead of letting this to be an abandoned project, I was thinking why not make it a popular project? At least while it spreads widely among Malaysian investors, he will regret for not paying the software which may have helped him to attract more students 😉

However, concern comes into my mind. There are so many good and professional stock market softwares already available in the market. What will make the users want to switch to my software? After several try-and-error by carefully listening to customer, here is what I planned, to grab the market share as soon as possible :-

(1) Many stock market software are targeted to intermediate and professional investors. Most beginners find the software difficult to learn and use. Hence, at the beginning, I concentrate on having “fun, easy, simple” software to be used.

(2) We will make it free. Free as in “freedom”. As we are not paid, and we cannot afford to hire anyone to develop, we will make the source code open, let anyone to study, and contribute to the software source code.

(3) We will make it free. Free as in “free beer”. Users pay 0 to get fully functional software. Some software in the market requires users to pay to get “advanced features”. We don’t play that trick. We make it completely free, with no hidden cost, no hidden features.

By using this strategy, we are pretty fast in grabbing the market. After 2 years, we can see the download rate grow from ~10 downloads copies per day, to ~200 downloads per day, and our users are from all over the world. Currently, primary users are from Malaysia and US, as our marketing plan is only done within these two regions.

If you search from google, “Free Stock Market Software”, you can see we are in the first page of Google 🙂

KCLau: What do you want to accomplish with Stock?

Our end greedy goal is to have a fully functional professional stock market software. We are still quite far from there, as we are not backed by any income or fund. (OK lah. To be honest, we do generate some income from web site advertisement. But I don’t call it income, I rather call it pocket money, as its amount is too small, to sustain a life for single programmer). We are trying very hard to grab a tiny portion of investors, who are bored in using over complex software, or too poor to buy a software 🙂

Most contributors to JStock are not money motivated, this make us a bit difficult to have committed members. Most of them are just one/two time contributors. However, so far we are happy of their contributions. Although there is no money rewarded, but it is a win-win situation. JStock provide a platform for programmers to show off their technical skill, which will make them easy to be employed. JStock also provides platform for a small start-up graphics company, giving publicity to their new company.

This means, you contribute, we publish for you 😉

Investors love JStock

KCLau: How is the users’ response so far? Can you give us some specific feedbacks from your users?

We are pretty on track. Most of their comment is “easy to use”. This at least achieves our first stage goal. Here is one of the comment from users

BTW, thanks for the software. Although I am not using it due to lack of sufficient inbuilt technical indicators, I still think that the project is on the right track (‘right’ meaning user-friendly….. very very unlike ultra-geekish xxx, yyy and such like).

Future Development of JStock

KCLau: What is the future development of JStock?

We will start concentrating on intermediate level investors. We will start to have more and more technical analysis and advanced charting features. Of course, we will not run away from our core (fun, easy and simple) when we develop these advanced features.

Next version, we are going to release cloud feature. Thanks to the hard work of one of our team members Shuwn Yuan Tee. This feature enables user to add portfolio at home, and open up his portfolio from office.

Thanks a lot to Yan for the interview. If you invest in the stock market, go download JStock and give it a try.

Update: I’ve asked Yan Cheng Cheok to demonstrate the latest version of JStock. Watch the video below:

Click here to watch the full 28 minutes session.
Important:
This software is currenly participating in a monthly contest. It is important to vote for JStock so that you will get a better free software that’s so useful. Read Yan Cheng Cheok’s appeal here: http://jstock.sourceforge.net/personal-appeal.html

Or you can just show your support by voting for JStock on this page:
http://twtpoll.com/l2cil8 – direct link to vote (Twitter account required)