 Recently, I did what I called an off-topic live stream where I asked you guys to ask me questions that weren't related to Linux, right? So you guys asked me a lot about personal life and hobbies and stuff like that. And I got a lot of questions on that particular live stream about, hey, DT, do you trade stocks? Do you have any investments? What kind of stock trading programs do you use on Linux? And I thought those were great questions. So I actually didn't address those on that live stream because I thought it deserved its own video. So today I wanted to share with you some stock trading applications that I use on Linux. Because many stock trading programs and many large brokers, they really expect you to be on Windows, unfortunately. But there are a few large brokerages out there that their desktop trading clients do actually work on Linux. Right now, I only have one funded account on one brokerage. Right now, I use a brokerage called Tasty Works. Tasty Works, I use them for two reasons. One, they have some of the lowest fees in the business. They focus heavily on options trading and futures trading. And their fees for options and futures are very low. Their fees for options, they only charge you $1 per contract and they don't charge you anything for a closing contract. So it's just $1 for the opening contract. They also have a $10 max per leg on the options. So if you trade 100 contracts, you're only being charged $10 max on each leg. The other reason I choose to use Tasty Works is because they support Linux. They have a desktop trading application that runs natively on Linux. It's a Java application, so these Java runtime environment applications, of course, are very easily cross-platform so they work on Windows, Mac, and Linux. That is one of the things that attracted me is the low fees and the fact that I have a native desktop application available on Linux and on an arch-based distribution. You can actually find Tasty Works in the AUR. The Tasty Works application is really an attractive desktop trading client. It has nice font size out of the box. It's not too small, not too big. You can adjust the size a little bit. That's very an intuitive platform. I mean, you do have some basic charting stuff you can do. Of course, you can also trade something like I can click. Right now, we're looking at the Uber stock. And if I wanted to, I mean, I could go down here and I could do a short iron condor. I could put that on. I could adjust the width of the strikes here to whatever it is I wanted to. I could click review and send and away I go. Of course, I don't actually want to make that trade. It's after hours at the moment anyway. You have the ability to check out your watch list so you can see what kind of trades you want to put on, what stocks, what ETFs, what futures, or having their 52-week high or their 52-week low, or what's their liquidity, what's their IV rank. Tasty Works is really in this three-column kind of format. You can actually adjust some of this stuff out. Typically, I keep this first column just shrunk as low as it'll go. I really don't really use this much. This is the main window here. And then this far right-hand column, I actually usually click the arrow here and pop that out. And I actually put that full screen on one of my other monitors because I have a multi-monitor setup. So usually, I'll just move that over to my other monitor and I'll have really the watch list full screen on another monitor. And that way I can just use this particular monitor to maybe check out the chart or maybe I want to look for the options chain here on Twitter. Maybe I want to trade, I don't know, the 70-day-away expirations here on Twitter. I can look at the options chain here. So that is Tasty Works. Tasty Works was founded by the original creator of Thinkorswim. And Thinkorswim was the brokerage I used before I discovered Tasty Works. So this is the Thinkorswim desktop client. And when I switched to desktop Linux full-time about 12, 13 years ago, when I first moved from Windows to Linux, I signed up for an account at TDA. TDA Ameritrade, who is the company that purchased Thinkorswim. And the reason I signed up for an account with those guys is because when I switched to Linux way back then, this was really one of the few stock trading applications that worked natively on Linux. There was really nothing else available at the time. So that's why I've always been a Thinkorswim user, although even though I have an account with them and that's why this application works for me, I mean we could actually get some real-time charts going on right now. It's after hours though, so there's no trading going on. But currently I don't actually have the account funded. If I didn't have it in privacy mode here, I really would be okay here because there's nothing to show you guys. It would just be zeros as far as the net liquidity because I've moved all my money since over to Tasty Works. I moved to Tasty Works about two years ago. But even though I use Tasty Works, the main reason I use Tasty Works is because I like the low fees on options trading. If you don't actually trade options, if you trade anything else, like stocks or forex or futures even, you probably want to give Thinkorswim a serious look because this is probably the best trading software available on the planet and it's actually free. They actually give you the desktop trading client here. The only thing is you won't get real-time data unless you actually sign up for an account with them and actually fund the account. But you don't actually have to trade. All you have to do is put some money in the account. Afterwards, if you just withdrew the money from the account, the application is still going to work for you. Right now I don't have this account funded, but the desktop client does work and I get real-time data on this application if I wanted to use it. I will say because Thinkorswim is such a really powerful piece of software, it can be confusing to the new user. There are so many options available for you and when I'm talking about options, I'm not talking about looking at an options chain. I'm talking about there are so many options available within the software. It's got a lot of stuff going on here. It's got a lot of parts to it. But I would suggest for most people, TD Ameritrade and the Thinkorswim desktop client is probably the first thing you want to check out if you are a desktop Linux user because it's just a fantastic piece of software. One thing you can also take into account with some of these brokerages like Tastyworks and TD Ameritrade, who is the company behind Thinkorswim, is that even though they have desktop applications, you are not stuck trading with the desktop application because both of those particular firms have great mobile applications available as well. And also you can do some web-based trading as well with Tastyworks. You can just go to trade.tastyworks.com and log in through this web interface and you have this web-based trading platform here that you could make trades on. Now, I prefer the desktop client. It has more features and it's more powerful. But still, just having different ways to make a trade I think is pretty neat. Now, some other native Linux programs I have tried in the past. There is another Java application. It seems like all of these are Java applications that are cross-platform. I have used ProRealTime in the past years ago, which is another fantastic, really charting platform. You have to pay for it though. It's not something you can go get for free. I think they do like a two-week free trial. You have to sign up for an account and they give you a two-week free trial. Some brokerages do use ProRealTime software. I think if you sign up for a brokerage that actually uses ProRealTime software, then you actually get the application and the data and all for free. If you're just somebody that wants the software, it's kind of expensive. So that's the downside to ProRealTime. But it does work on Linux. I've used it in the past and it actually has a ton of features. It's actually a pretty good program. Now, one thing people are going to ask is all of these, of course, are proprietary software and yes, they are. You can't get around that. Unfortunately, when we talk about free and open source software, you're not going to find that. When we talk about stop trading or anything financial, anything that involves bank transactions, there's no free and open source software anywhere in that world. The whole banking system, the whole financial industry runs on proprietary software and you're not going to find anything that's remotely free and open source software. It's really just impossible. You're going to have to deal with proprietary software. I do want to mention one piece of open source software that is good, I guess, for portfolio management. I personally don't use this program, but it's been around for decades and it is called J-Stock. So let me get back over to my desktop here and let me launch J-Stock. Now I don't use this particular program. It is free and open source software, but it looks terrible. It is licensed under the GPL, but this is the default look and feel. I can't read that font. That font is just jagged and it's not anti-aliased and it's just hideous. Now you do have some options. I can change the look and feel. I can change to this theme here. The fonts actually look pretty bad there too. I don't think I can improve the fonts here. That's nice, changing to the GTK theme, but the fonts actually got worse using that theme. So let me go back to the default theme. Now this is not tied in any way to a brokerage. That's why it's free and open source software. It's because there's no financial transactions here. This is really, you put a stock or an ETF or whatever. If I wanted to check out Apple, I could get the latest price on Apple and you actually do get not real time data, but pretty close. I'm sure there's a few seconds delay, but this isn't something you would use for trading. This is really just to check in on your portfolio. So you have a bunch of money tied into a few ETFs, maybe a few big stocks or whatever. And you want to check on that every now and then to see if you're up or down. That's what you would use Jstock for. It's not really for trading per se, but I did want to just briefly mention it because I know some people will ask about it in the comments below. And since it is licensed under the GPL, I don't mind pointing you guys in that direction. It is available on Windows as well too. I think it's a cross-platform application and just knowing how things typically work, I bet it looks fantastic on Windows. I bet it doesn't have that weird, just unreadable font and everything that's going on on Linux. I bet that's a Linux only problem because I've seen screenshots of Jstock running on Windows and it actually looks better on Windows. I don't have a Windows machine to test that theory on. Now, some of the trading applications that I haven't tried on Linux. I've never tried any that are not native to Linux. Like I'm sure there are several that may run inside Wine. I don't like running Windows only applications inside Wine. I don't like fooling with Wine. So I've never tried any of that stuff. But you guys, if you've got some other applications that either work natively on Linux or work really well within Wine, share in the comments. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this show. Capsi, Devin, Fran, Gabe, Grubinian, Mitchell, Akami, Arch 5530, Chris, Chuck, David, the other David, Donnie, Dylan, Gregory, Louis, Paul, Pick, V.M., Scott, Wes, and Willie. They are the producers of this episode without these guys. You wouldn't know about all these great stock trading applications that are available natively on Linux. You wouldn't know about them. I also want to thank each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because the DistroTube channel is sponsored by you guys, the community. If you'd like to support my work, look for DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys. Peace. I can't believe I looked up Apple. They sell proprietary garbage.