Quoter is a small command line tool to fetch stock quotes and US index data. It's a single executable JAR file. No installation needed, just download the file and run it from the command line with java -jar quoter.jar

Quoter simply pulls the stock and index data from a financial website. Because the data iss scraped from a website, if the provider changes the site structure, the is a high likelihood that Quoter will break. It's not a hard fix usually, but does mean I'll need to update it. This is why it's always a good idea to be running the latest version.

I live in the US and quoter is configured to pull indexes from the three common US exchanges: DOW, S&P500, and the NASDAQ. However, stock values should be able to be pulled from other countries assuming it's supported.

No parameters are required. If none are entered, the program will provide the DOW, NASDAQ, and S&P500 index data.

However, you probably want some quotes. Therefore, provide one or more.

Example:

java -jar quoter.jar amzn msft acn ibm
java -jar quoter.jar -x outputfile.csv t bp cmcsa ni vz 

If you frequently check the same set of securities, as I do, you can save them in your preferences file as facorites so you don't need to type them in each time or setup an alias. By simply adding -s to your quoter command line, the provided securities will be saved overwriting any that were previously saved. Then by running Quoter, those will be be used in addition to any you've added to the command line.

Running Quoter with -r will remove any saved quotes. Running with -i will ignore the saved quotes for that execution. Running with a -l will list your current saved favorites.

This powerful feature will display the requested (with -d) days to trend. The default is 90 days. The dates are on the Y axis, an the cost is on the X axis, you just tilt your head to the right (like you were eating a taco) and you'll be set :-)

It's executed by giving Quoter the -t command line switch. If there are 5 symbols on the command line, it will trend them all in sequence.

The display will show you the last three months of data with the daily range and the close price.

I would encourage anyone with a supported Linux platform to install Quoter as a snap. See Snapcraft Homepage for more information. You can download, install, and keep the application up to date automatically by installing the snap via :

sudo snap install quoter (Assuming snap is installed. Ubuntu has it by default)

This will install the application into a sandbox where it is separate from other applications. Java is even included in the SNAP package so you don't evey have to have it elsewhere.

SNAPs are easy to install and remove. They are automatically updated and run with everything it needs in the package. For example, Quoter is a Java application, but you don't have to even have Java installed on your system as it's packaged within the SNAP.

If you are going to use the export capability, you'll need to give the snap access to your home directory. This is done after the snap installation by connecting quoter to the home interface. Simply run the following:

sudo snap connect quoter:home

This is obviously not meant to be a large financial package. It's just a small utility that I wanted to use to tell me if I'll ever be able to retire :-) If you have suggestions or idea, please let me know.

quoter at fross dot org

The MIT License

Copyright 2019-2024 by Michael Fross

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