Free Stocks Ticker for Windows

Free Stocks Ticker places a scrolling stock price ticker at the bottom or top of your screen. It displays current stock prices and news feeds from Yahoo, CNN, FOX, and your own sources. You can configure the speed, opacity, and colors of the display, and it's one of the nicest programs of its type that we've tried.

Free Stocks Ticker displays stock prices in a semiopaque black bar. The text is also slightly transparent but still perfectly legible, giving a nice effect that doesn't hide pop-up messages in the notification area. Price changes are color-coded; for example, rising prices are shown in green, falling prices in orange. The ticker displays the name and symbol of the stock as well as its current price. Holding our cursor over a quote slowed the ticker to a crawl while a tooltip balloon popped up with detailed information and links to news stories that we could click to open in our browser--it's a very nice effect, and useful, too.

Right-clicking the ticker called up an extensive menu accessing our Feeds and also displayed options such as Faster and Slower and All or Random feeds. We clicked Setup, which produced a properties sheet that let us set the number of scrolling lines (up to six) and font size, change background and highlight colors, and set opacity. The RSS Feeds tab made it easy to add and delete feeds as well as turn off the tooltips, hide the preset feeds, and even rename feed titles.

We tried as many as six feeds at once, and it's less distracting than you'd think, though one or two is much better. A two-line feed with stocks and news is familiar to anyone who watches cable TV, and it fits right in on a computer screen. Free Stocks Ticker works especially well with widescreen monitors since they can hold a lot of information in eye range. Need a free stock ticker? Here it is.