Choosing WPF Charting Controls for Financial Applications
Article Quant Q&A · Author: Rajesh Patil
Summary
The document surveys charting options for WPF finance software, including Microsoft offerings and commercial libraries. It compares them by capabilities such as financial series, annotations, multi-pane layouts, real-time updates, rendering speed, and customization. The central lesson is to match the control to the application’s needs: performance and specialized trading features may matter more than general UI polish, while platform restrictions can rule out particular rendering techniques.
The evidence is practitioner commentary and vendor descriptions rather than a controlled benchmark. One response reports that SciChart was used successfully and cites a speed comparison with another library; a vendor also describes live-market deployments and multiple simultaneous charts. These claims are not independently validated in the document, and some answers come from library owners. The discussion is a technology overview, not guidance on trading strategy or market-data analysis.
Key ideas
- WPF finance applications can use Microsoft charting components or third-party libraries.
- Financial charting needs may include candlesticks, OHLC series, indicators, annotations, and synchronized panes.
- Rendering speed and real-time responsiveness are important selection criteria for busy market displays.
- Unsafe rendering techniques may conflict with deployment platform restrictions.
- The comparisons rely mainly on practitioner and vendor claims rather than independent testing.
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Full text
# How to create charts in WPF finance applications? # How to create charts in WPF finance applications? How to create charts for market data in WPF? Are there any charting controls provided by microsoft or you need to use only third party controls? Which are the popular third party charting controls used predominantly by banks? ## Answer by IgorS (score 8, accepted) https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/7067 - SciChart I used SciChart and was happy with it. This is extremely rich charting library ($500 per licence; \$1000 with source code). - Infragistics A premium UI library. I haven't tried Infragistics charts particularly, but I'm sure they are as much perfect as their other controls (grids, ribbons etc). - MS Chart - Extended WPF Toolkit SciChart vs Infragistics Chart. I should add that Infragistics are mostly concentrated on the overall usability and esthetics of the charts while SciChart focuses on functionality and performance. SciChart vs VisiBlox. The comparison between SciChart and Visiblox says that SciChart is 30%-250% faster. Unsafe code in SciChart. SciChart uses unsafe code to write to bitmap in the fastest possible way. Once we were developing the app for Bloomberg Store we had to use WPF Toolkit instead because Bloomberg didn't allow unsafe calls. ## Answer by Dr. Andrew Burnett-Thompson (score 2) https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/7885 Definitely check out SciChart, which is a commercial WPF stock chart control built with financial & scientific users in mind. There is a review posted here and here. SciChart supports - Candlestick, OHLC - Line, Step-Line - Mountain, Column - Scatter - Band series (High Low Fill) - Annotations such as line, arrow, trendline, custom buy or sell markers - Composite annotations such as Fibonacci Retracement, Fib Extension - Multi-paned stock charts charts / shared mouse events across charts - XAxis Scrollbars for stock charts - 3D Surface plots as well as 2D Charts - Heatmaps - Tooltips, customisation of tooltips - Data-point selection & series click to select - Legends - Many many more features (too many to list here) As far as performance / speed goes, in tests it's the fastest WPF Chart!, using the same low-level bitmap rendering as you find in Windows Forms charts, and in some editions, full DirectX rendering. It is being used in MTPredictor v7.5 (an Elliot Wave trading platform) who have tested it in live markets with several monitors and several charts all open, all ticking simultaneously. You can see a webinar of MTPredictor running SciChart here. Note MTP run a webinar once per day and videos are all on youtube. We had a trial user contact us with a youtube demo showing scichart in real-time trading application, in a live market with multiple ticks per second being pushed to the chart. In our installer we have several live demos showing real-time financial charting and multi-pane financial charting. As another poster mentioned, it is a commercial chart but we aim to provide excellent support and fix bugs in a timely manner. Hope this helps! Full Disclosure: I am the owner and tech lead on the SciChart project ## Answer by Robert (score 1) https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/9653 I own Gigasoft, if researching financial WPF charting, see our 7 meg demo download. Fast to download, uninstalls easily with no issues, and demonstrate our robustness, speed, user code, and rendering quality: link to financial .net wpf charting. Date time handling, mult-axes, and extensive annotations are key to good financial use and we've spent years perfecting these features. A customer was nice enough to send us this showing excellent use of annotations to produce a custom Gartley financial pattern ... ## Answer by Pasi Tuomainen (score 1) https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/54396 There's now a new LightningChart(R) Trader WPF library available. It is designed to provide simple and straightforward way to add charting capabilities, technical indicators and drawing tools, for WPF apps for trading and finance. Short YouTube video - Color themes - Data cursors - Data loading from REST API, reading from CSV file, or setting by code - Security search - Automatic removal of non-trading periods - Built in graph segments management Technical Indicators - Simple Moving Average (SMA) - Exponential Moving Average (EMA) - Weighted Moving Average (WMA) - Bollinger Band - Relative Strength Index (RSI) - Moving Average Convergence Divergence (MACD) Built-in Drawing Tools - Trend line - Linear regression channel - Fibonacci fan - Fibonacci arcs - Fibonacci retracement The Trader library source code (free of charge for all LightningChart subscribers) allows easy customization of this API, and adding functionality with robust and fast LightningChart WPF API, including 3D features. Usage - Add TradingChart control from Toolbox to your WPF UI. - Set Symbol property to "AAPL" or other security, or use the built-in search control. - Add Technical Indicators and Drawing Tools from drop-down menu in the runtime, or add them by code or XAML I'd be happy to get your improvement suggestions for this library. I'm tech lead of LightningChart
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