If you’re tracking the market, you need access to a stock ticker.

Some of us might have the luxury of a television set tuned to one of the business channels within our view at all times, but for the rest of us a free desktop stock ticker makes more sense.

There are many stock ticker options available. Here are five you might want to look into. All offer varying degrees of customization and different display options but they do have one thing in common–they’ll give you a chance to track the stock market while you use your PC. Here they are:

FreeStockTicker.com. If you’re using a Windows XP/2000 computer and have at least 1 MB of free disk space, you can use this option to track your portfolio. According to its creators,

“You can configure everything about the stock ticker in easy to access menus with drag and drop interfaces. The stock ticker has customizable skins and uses an automatic updater so that the version is always updated. The best part is that this is freeware and never requires registration.”

Free Desktop Stock Ticker. Mark Crisp offers this free ticker download. It’s a sleek and attractive ticker that can run right across the top of your desktop. Crisp doesn’t provide a great deal of information about his tracker on its website, but he is a well-known teacher and adviser.

Cool Tick. Cool Tick claims to be the web’s best stock ticker. According to the Cool Tick site, it’s a “small, scrolling stock ticker…” with an “unobtrusive design that lets you work while the market works for you”. It appears to be readily customizable, too. Based on the user testimonials, this is a fairly strong entry into the PC stock ticker field.

Ticker Tape. Here’s another desktop ticker option to check out. According to the download site,

“TickerTape is a small desktop ticker that displays your stocks and keeps you connected to other investors with a built-in message board. When messages are posted and you are monitoring the stock the stocks envelop will light up. The user needs to register on the Web site to use the message board.”

It appears as if the makers of TickerTape update the program regularly, which is definitely a quality indicator.

Stock Ticker Application Bar. This shareware offering is described as follows:

“Stock Ticker Application Bar is a software designed for continuous retrieval of stock quotes through the Internet. It is an simple stock ticker tape that resides at the top or the bottom of your screen and displays quotes of predefined list of stock and indices symbols in a form of a scrolling message. It displays quotes for up to 200 securities, automatically or manually updates data, has user defined positioning, scrolling speed, fonts selection…”

If you’re in need of a way to track the market while you do other things on your computer, these free desktop stock ticker options may be exactly what you’ve been looking for. There’s no reason to wait on delayed results or to stop everything just to find out how your investments are faring. You can get the information easily and instantly with programs like these.

CAUTION: This list of free desktop stock tickers does not represent an endorsement of any kind. These are free-standing programs and users will need to download files in order to use them. There is always a risk associated with downloads and you should do your due diligence before downloading any of these ticker programs. Better safe than sorry!