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| DO NOT PANIC Portfolio Visualizer turns delayed market data into an animated, full-screen financial display. |
Stock-market dashboards usually resemble spreadsheets that have acquired several extra panels and begun making demands. We wanted something different: a financial display that could live on a second monitor, office screen, television, or wall-mounted panel without looking like an accounting department had occupied the room.
The result is DO NOT PANIC Portfolio Visualizer 1.0, a free animated stock market dashboard for 64-bit Windows 10 and Windows 11. It combines delayed portfolio quotes, four customizable ticker tapes, floating charts, global market clocks, macro indicators, financial headlines, and rotating city or stock-exchange backgrounds. It is now available from the project’s official GitHub release and its itch.io download page.
A Stock Market Dashboard Designed to Be Watched
DO NOT PANIC is a Windows stock market dashboard for ambient display rather than a brokerage screen. The display fills progressively as quote requests complete. One slow symbol does not need to freeze everything else, which is reassuring because financial data providers occasionally respond with the urgency of a committee studying a new stapler.
Four independent ticker-tape lanes can show stocks, ETFs, indexes, and other supported symbols. Each tape has its own name, direction, and speed. Fresh quotes briefly flash blue when unchanged, green when higher, and red when lower. Only the item receiving a valid update flashes, so stale or missing data does not get to perform interpretive dance.
The visualizer also selects up to 16 of the largest portfolio movers for floating graph cards. Intraday charts use exchange-local times. When current-session history is unavailable during weekends, holidays, or off-hours, recent daily closes can provide a fallback view with exchange-local dates.
Macro Markets, World Exchanges, and News
The upper macro ribbon tracks a broad set of market signals, including major U.S. indexes, volatility, Treasury yields, gold, crude oil, Bitcoin, and the U.S. dollar index. A separate Global Markets ribbon shows financial centers with exchange-local time, market direction, session status, countdowns, and available local weather.
The financial-news scroller works in ordinary RSS mode without an account or API key. An optional AI mode can rewrite current business headlines as Douglas Adams-inspired Vogon haiku or classical Shakespearean summaries. This is entirely optional, because the market is already strange enough without requiring every headline to scan in iambic pentameter.
Users can choose built-in backgrounds, download the managed collection, or point the application at a personal image folder and its subfolders. Slow rotation and zoom turn the dashboard into a moving financial display rather than a static wallpaper with numbers bolted to it.
Watch the Windows Dashboard in Action
A still screenshot can show the layout, but motion is a large part of the design. The demonstration shows ticker items updating one at a time, graph cards moving across the scene, headlines advancing at a readable pace, and backgrounds changing without turning the whole screen into a slot machine.
The app can run in a normal window, maximized, or full screen. Press F11 or double-click the main view to switch full-screen mode, then press Esc to return. This makes the same build useful on a laptop, second monitor, ultrawide display, office television, or dedicated wall screen.
How the Software Is Put Together
The public repository is more than a place to store an installer and look technical from a safe distance. The application is built as a modular .NET 10 WPF desktop system targeting Windows x64. Separate projects handle the desktop shell, presentation logic, settings, shared services, data access, media, rendering, tests, and the bundled Quote Provider module.
WPF desktop scene
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Startup and presentation coordinator
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Quotes, history, news, market timing, weather, and background services
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Product-owned Quote Provider client/server protocol on local loopback
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Delayed market-data retrieval, normalization, caching, and UI updates
The desktop client owns quote scheduling. It sends one symbol request per second and keeps a small request pipeline moving so completed replies can be processed without making the display wait for the slowest lookup. The local Quote Provider module communicates over TCP on the loopback interface using length-prefixed UTF-8 JSON messages with request IDs, normalized responses, explicit error states, and cache metadata.
Historical chart retrieval follows a separate path. The provider checks a local cache first, limits concurrent history requests, retries transient network failures, and can fall back to stale cached history when fresh data cannot be obtained. That design matters for a display intended to stay open for long periods. A temporary network failure should produce an honest degraded state, not an empty screen pretending it has retired.
The news service follows the same practical rule. RSS is the default. AI summaries require a user-supplied OpenAI-compatible key and endpoint configuration. If AI access fails, the application falls back to RSS and tries again during a later refresh. Settings, protected provider secrets, chart and news caches, traces, and downloaded backgrounds stay under the application’s Local AppData folder.
Developers can read the build and deployment guide and the technical documentation library. The repository also contains tests, release procedures, installation scripts, third-party notices, and the public issue tracker.
Two Official Distribution Channels
GitHub: Canonical Source, Documentation, and Release
The GitHub repository is the canonical project home. It contains the complete source tree, README, technical documents, build instructions, release history, license, issue tracker, and the versioned Windows installer release.
The official v1.0 release includes the installer, a published SHA-256 checksum, and a VirusTotal advisory report. GitHub is the best route for developers, reviewers, and anyone who prefers to inspect the machinery before allowing it onto a Windows computer. This is a healthy instinct. Computers reward healthy instincts eventually, often after first punishing several unhealthy ones.
itch.io: The Convenient Public Download Page
The itch.io page is the easier download surface for general users. It presents the feature summary, video demonstration, installation steps, system requirements, privacy notes, financial disclaimer, and the full public v1.0 download set.
The itch.io mirror includes the Windows installer, SHA-256 checksum, generated MD5 checksum, and VirusTotal advisory report. It is populated after the GitHub release set is complete, so the two channels serve different audiences without becoming competing versions of reality. One is the workshop. The other has a larger download button.
Installation and Configuration
- Download
DoNotPanicPortfolioVisualizerSetup-1.0.exefrom the official GitHub release or itch.io page. - Download the matching SHA-256 checksum file and the VirusTotal advisory report.
- Verify the installer checksum if you are comfortable using a checksum tool.
- Run the installer and accept the SANYALnet Labs Non-Commercial License.
- Launch the application from the Desktop or Start menu shortcut.
Open Options > Configure to set portfolio symbols, tape names, directions, speeds, background rotation, a personal image folder, RSS or AI-assisted news, and the news-writing style. The configuration screen validates proposed symbols and optional AI access before applying changes.
Free to Use, Source-Available, and Deliberately Not a Trading Terminal
DO NOT PANIC Portfolio Visualizer is free for strictly non-commercial personal, educational, and hobbyist use under the SANYALnet Labs Non-Commercial License. The source is publicly available for inspection and permitted study or modification within the license terms. Commercial use, corporate internal use, monetization, and AI model training require separate authorization. This is source-available software, not an OSI open-source release.
The dashboard uses delayed market data, normally delayed by at least 15 minutes, and data may be incomplete, revised, unavailable, or inaccurate. The application is built for visualization, education, and entertainment. It is not a brokerage application, trading terminal, portfolio-accounting system, tax tool, valuation system, alerting platform, or dependable financial monitor.
In practical terms: enjoy the lights, watch the market breathe, and do not hand the application your retirement.