What is a good open source Windows finance software
Have you tried others on Wikipedia's list? You really shouldn't be using class tracking to keep business and personal operations separate. I'm pretty sure the IRS and courts frown upon this, and you're probably risking losing any limited liability you may have. And for keeping separate parts of the business separate, like say stores in a franchise, one approach would be subaccounts. Messy, I'm sure.
Frankly, the article is mostly right, but I disagree with his specific recommendation.  Why use one of these software services at all?  Put your money into a retirement (or other) account and invest it in index funds.  Beating index funds over the long run is pretty difficult, and if anyone's going to do it, it won't be someone that treats it like a hobby, regardless of whether you pick stocks yourself or let some software do it for you.  I personally think the big value-add from investment advisers only comes in the form of tax and regulation advice.  Knowing what kind of tax-exempt accounts exist and what the rules for them are is useful, and often non-trivial to fully grasp and plan for.  Also, the investment advisers I've talked to seemed to be pretty knowledgeable about that sort of thing, whereas their understanding of investment concepts like risk/reward tradeoffs, statistics, and portfolio optimization is generally weak. About 10 years ago, I used to use MetaStock Trader which was a very sound tool, with a large number of indicators, but it has been a number of years since I have used it, so my comments on it will be out of date. At the time it relied upon me purchasing trading data myself, which is why I switched to Incredible Charts. I currently use Incredible Charts which I have done for a number of years, initially on the free adware service, now on the $10/year for EOD data access. There are quicker levels of data access, which might suit you, but I can't comment on these. It is web-based which is key for me. The data quality is very good and the number of inbuilt indicators is excellent. You can build search routines on the basis of specific indicators which is very effective. I'm looking at VectorVest, as a replacement for (or in addition to) Incredible Charts, as it has very powerful backtesting routines and the ability to run test portfolios with specific buy/sell criteria that can simulate and backtest a number of trading scenarios at the same time. The advantage of all of these is they are not tied to a particular broker. I'm really sorry, but what do you mean by ISM? I googled it but found nothing.. Thanks!  Anyway, the WF product is really good indeed. Maybe we (r/finance) could start a weekly report too, quoting major reports like this one, and make some comments/analysis. That could be interesting don't you think? It would take quite some time but I think this sub lacks something like this. I spent a while looking for something similar a few weeks back and ended up getting frustrated and asking to borrow a friend's Bloombterg.   I wish you the best of luck finding something,  but I wasn't able to.   S&amp;P and Morningstar have some stuff on their site,  but I wasn't able to make use of it.  Edit: Also,  Bloomberg allows shared terminals.  Depending on how much you think as a firm,  these questions might come up,  it might be worth the 20k / year "Open standards need to be put in place by the open source community (including business interests), codified into a self-hosted option as a first class citizen *by law*, with a final sugar coated offering of hosted options managed by private enterprise. They can use the open source model as much or as little as they want.  With the Equifax scandal, we have little option but to include a ""nerd friendly"" secure version of this software that's available on the government's dime. And by government I mean ""we the people"", not ""big government""." I work for a fund management company and we get our news through two different service providers Bloomberg and Thomson One. They don't actually source the news though they just feed news from other providers Professional solutions (costs ranging from $300-1500+ USD/month/user) Bloomberg is available as a windows install or via Bloomberg Anywhere which offers bimometric access via browser. Bloomberg is superb and their customer support is excellent but they aren't cheap. If you're looking for a free amateur solution for stock news I'd take a look at There are dozens of other tools people can use for day trading that usually provide news and real time prices at a cost but I don't have any direct experience with them I have no idea if Wikivest can handle options, but I've been pretty satisfied with it as a portfolio visualization tool. It links automatically with many brokerage accounts, and has breakdowns by both portfolio and individual investment levels. hledger is a free software, cross-platform double-entry accounting tool I've been working on for a while. It has command-line and web-based interfaces to your local data, and some other interesting features. There's also ledger (http://wiki.github.com/jwiegley/ledger/) which is command-line only. These are.. different, but worth a look for some folks. As @littleadv and @DumbCoder point out in their comments above, Bloomberg Terminal is expensive for individual investors.  If you are looking for a free solution I would recommend Yahoo and Google Finance. On the other side, if you need more financial metrics regarding historic statements and consensus estimates, you should look at the iPad solution from Worldcap, which is not free, but significantly cheaper then Bloomberg and Reuters. Disclosure: I am affiliated with WorldCap. What is more practical for Finance, R or Python? I understand committing time to Python will mean I have a language that is versatile and useable across multiple areas of a business, and will give me skill that is alternative to finance, but is it a bit impractical if I don't ever see myself needing to develop software and would rather focus on data analysis which R is great for?  Edit: Also, I have done introductory R programming in university (It was a 1 semester course so not extensive). So it would be less time committed. I currently use Moneydance on my Mac.  Before that I had used Quicken on a PC until version 2007. It is pretty good, does most simple investment stuff just fine. It can automatically download prices for regular stocks.  Mutual funds I have to input by hand. Based on my experience with OpenQuant, which is a development platform for automated trading strategies (and therefore can be easily be used for backtesting your personal strategy), I can give a little insight into what you might look for in such a platform.  OpenQuant is a coding environment, which reads data feeds from a variety of sources (more on that in the second point), and runs the code for your strategy on that data and gives you the results. The data could be imported from a live data feed or from historical data, either through numerous API's, CSV/Excel, etc. You can write your own strategies using the custom C# libraries included with the software, which spares you from implementing your own code for technical indicators, basic statistical functions, etc. Getting the data is another issue. You could use joe's strategy and calculate option prices yourself, although you need to exercise caution when doing this to test a strategy. However, there is no substitute for backtesting a strategy on real data. Markets change over time, and depending on how far back you're interested in testing your strategy, you may run into problems. The reason there is no substitute for using real data is that attempting to replicate the data may fail in some circumstances, and you need a method of verifying that the data you're generating is correct and realistic. Calculating a few values, comparing them to the real values, and calibrating accordingly is a good idea, but you have to decide for yourself how many checks you want to do. More is better, but it may not be enough to realistically test your strategy. Disclaimer: Lest you interpret my post as a shameless plug for the OpenQuant platform, I'll state that I found the interface awful (it looked vaguely like Office 2000 but ten years too late) and the documentation woefully incomplete. I last used the software in 2010, so it may have improved in the intervening years, but your mileage may vary. I only use it as an example to give some insight into what you might look for in a backtesting platform. When you actually begin trading, a different platform is likely in order.  That being said, it responded fairly quickly and the learning curve wasn't too steep. The platform wasn't too expensive at the time (about $700 for a license with no data feeds, I think) but I was happy that the cost wasn't coming out of my pocket. It's only gotten more expensive and I'm not sure it's worth it. We are mostly .NET C#. I'm not trying to sound like a big shot but generally, to work in finance as a software engineer, you have to be good at what you do. More specifically, I work on developing the inside tools for our traders and mutual/hedge fund managers to manage the business. I work on benchmark, asset, and valuation analysis tools. Technologies I use on a daily basis are C#, SQL, JavaScript, JQuery, MVVM (and other design patterns), HTML5, and more specialized unit testing tools. If you have any more questions, feel free to ask or pm. "The Yahoo Finance API is no longer available, so Finance::Quote needs to point at something else.  Recent versions of Finance::Quote can use AlphaVantage as a replacement for the Yahoo Finance API, but individual users need to acquire and input an AlphaVantage API key. Pretty decent documentation for how to this is available at the GnuCash wiki. Once you've followed the directions on the wiki and set the API key, you still need to tell each individual security to use AlphaVantage rather than Yahoo Finance: As a warning, I've been having intermittent trouble with AlphaVantage.  From the GnuCash wiki:  Be patient. Alphavantage does not have the resources that Yahoo! did and it is common for quote requests to time out, which GnuCash will present as ""unknown error"". I've certainly been experiencing those errors, though not always." often financial software is dire, with crappy interfaces and poorly integrated to the wider company. I have an ambition one day to create a modern human centred financial software that is focused on the task at hand rather than forcing the user to jump through unnecessary hoops. Also Excel should be banned for many reasons.