Ask HN: UI Design for Financial Trading

re WPF vs winforms: consensus recommendation would be WPF. But for something you're building for yourself, WPF has a lot of complexity that you may not get much benefit from. If you decide on WPF, don't use xaml! Separating dynamic UI into a static markup language is a complexity disaster that will cost you a lot of time. (Note that google results are dominated by xaml answers, so if you want code-only answers it's best to search github.)

Best approach may be a third option, at least as a prototype. Use Excel, with a RTD server that connects to TT. Uninstall the Bloomberg Excel Tools add-in and use direct calls into BBG's own RTD server, i.e., =RTD("BLOOMBERG.RTD","","VGA INDEX", "LAST_PRICE") instead of BDP(...) for market data (~100x faster), and you can get to an 80% solution very quickly.

re F# vs C#, I had used C# for a decade before switching (after I had a vacation ruined because of a multi-threading bug in our position-sizing model. Multi-core parallelism is much easier in F# due to default immutability). If you play around with the F# REPL you'll pretty quickly find out whether the language fits your mind well or not. For me, as soon as I read this code (http://fssnip.net/5I), I knew I had found my native language.

Not an expert on what is possible in that space these days but FPS is actually not that important in trading guis because you don’t need the whole canvas to refresh like you do in something like a shooter.

You don’t have to redraw a lot of things on each event because ladders and the like are mostly static while graphs are only dynamic in the tails.

Without observing your specific use case it is impossible to know what is causing your perception of lag, but I’d be shocked if it was bare refresh rate.

I’d guess their crappy code is just pissing off and not doing anything for big stretches of time because it isn’t good.