LeekFund: a VS Code stock and fund ticker that hides in your editor

The problem LeekFund solves, and who has that problem

Anyone who follows Chinese funds or A-share stocks during a workday faces a context-switch tax. Opening a broker app or a quote site to check a position means leaving the editor, and on a locked-down corporate machine a trading client may not even be installable. LeekFund's answer is to put the numbers where the code already is: a status bar summary, a Fund view, a Stock view, a XueQiu News view, a Binance view and a Forex view, all registered as activity bar containers in package.json. The README frames the pitch as tracking the market in the background while you use AI to write code, without interrupting the workflow.

The audience is narrow and specific. It is developers in the VS Code ecosystem who already hold positions in instruments the extension can query: domestic funds, A-shares, Hong Kong and US listings, domestic futures, overseas funds, forex rates and Binance pairs. It is not a tool for portfolio accounting, tax reporting or order execution. The README states plainly that the software is a data display aid, offers no investment advice, and carries no legal responsibility for quote errors caused by network latency or third parties.

How the extension is wired: views, activation events and data sources

The architecture is a standard VS Code extension. The entry point is ./out/extension.js, and the manifest declares activationEvents that include onStartupFinished plus onView triggers for leekFundView.fund, leekFundView.stock, leekFundView.news, leekFundView.binance and leekFundView.forex. That means the extension can wake on startup and populate the status bar before you open any panel, while the heavier panels load lazily when you click them.

Views are grouped under a single activity bar container with id leekFundMenu, titled LeekFund. The Binance and Forex views are declared with visibility set to hidden, so they exist in the manifest but are not shown by default. Commands follow the same namespace, for example leek-fund.refreshStock, leek-fund.refreshFund, leek-fund.stockWindVane and leek-fund.toggleStatusBarIconVisibility.

The data itself is not produced by the extension. The repository ships a demo directory with files such as demo/sina.js, demo/xueqiu.js, demo/xuangubao.js, demo/binance.js and demo/fundcode_search.js, which shows the upstream quote and news channels the project draws on. The README also says data comes from public network sources. This is the central design trade-off: LeekFund has no market data of its own, so its reliability is bounded by the reliability of third-party endpoints it does not control.

Installing LeekFund from the Visual Studio Marketplace

The README points to the Visual Studio Marketplace entry for giscafer.leek-fund as the installation route. The stated requirements are VS Code ^1.100.0 and Cursor ^3.0.0. Note that the engines field in package.json still reads ^1.59.0, which is lower than the README table; if you are on an older editor, the manifest is the looser of the two sources, but the README is the more recent statement of what is supported.

Installation happens through the Marketplace listing. The README gives no command-line install invocation, so the editor's own extension search is the documented path: search for the extension name and install it from there.

After installation, the extension activates on startup and contributes a LeekFund icon to the activity bar. Clicking it reveals the Fund, Stock and XueQiu News views. The Binance and Forex views are hidden by default, so they will not appear until you change that.

The first real use is adding an instrument to a watch list. The README does not print a full settings snippet, but it does show that configuration lives in the Settings view and that a stock-specific settings screen exists. Open the Settings view under the LeekFund container and add the codes you want to follow. Once a code is saved, the status bar shows a rolling summary and the corresponding view renders quotes, and for funds the README lists real-time and historical trend charts, a fund ranking list and disclosed holdings.

Where LeekFund stops being the right tool

The most important limitation is stated in the README itself: this is a data display tool. There is no order entry, no broker connection and no trade execution. If your requirement is to act on a signal rather than see it, LeekFund is the wrong layer.

The second limitation is dependency on external quote sources. Because data arrives from public channels and the project disclaims responsibility for errors introduced by network latency or third parties, a blocked or changed upstream endpoint degrades the extension with no local fallback. The README acknowledges this indirectly by offering a Pro feature called a market data relay, described as a self-hosted proxy that forwards stock and fund quote requests to a personal relay, aimed at networks that intercept securities APIs or at high-frequency monitoring. That is an admission that the default path can fail in restricted environments.

The third limitation is the feature split. Custom grouping, the full holdings management center, market news panels, the market cloud map, sector boards, webhook alerts to WeCom, DingTalk and Feishu, LeekAgent summaries and the editor blame disguise are all listed under LeekFund Pro. A user evaluating the free extension should read that list as the boundary of what they get.

Finally, release cadence deserves a look. The releases shown for this repository are v2.0.0 from 2021-10-01, v1.9.9 from 2021-06-07 and v1.9.8 from 2021-06-07, while package.json declares version 3.24.0. The GitHub releases page is not a reliable indicator of what is shipping. The repository is not archived and its last push was on 2026-06-30, so development has continued, but the version numbering on GitHub releases and in the manifest do not line up.

Alternatives and how their approach differs

The related searches around this project point at HQChart, Easyquotation and Openctp, and those are useful contrasts because they operate at different levels.

Easyquotation is a Python library for fetching Chinese market quotes. The difference is architectural: Easyquotation gives you a data access layer you call from your own script, with no editor integration and no UI. If you want a scheduled job that writes quotes into a file or a dashboard you control, that is a better fit than an extension whose output is a status bar.

HQChart is a charting component. It renders K-line and trend charts that you embed in your own application. LeekFund's fund trend charts and the K-line views in its 韭菜中心 are end-user screens; HQChart is the drawing layer you would use if you were building those screens yourself. Choosing between them is choosing between consuming a finished panel and building one.

Openctp sits in the futures trading infrastructure space, closer to connectivity than to display. LeekFund lists domestic futures quotes among its supported instruments but stops at showing them. If your work involves futures connectivity, Openctp addresses a problem LeekFund explicitly does not attempt.

Maintenance, upgrade cost and the BSD-3-Clause licence

The repository is not archived and the last push was on 2026-06-30, so the codebase is not abandoned. The manifest version 3.24.0 against GitHub releases that stop at v2.0.0 means you should treat the Marketplace listing as the source of truth for what is current, not the releases page.

Upgrade cost is low in the ordinary case. It is a VS Code extension, so updates arrive through the editor's extension mechanism, and your settings live in the editor's configuration store rather than in a database you have to migrate. The CHANGELOG.md at the repository root is where version-by-version changes are recorded; read it before a major jump.

Licensing is BSD-3-Clause, declared both in package.json and in the LICENSE file at the repository root. That is a permissive licence, which generally means you can use, modify and redistribute the code provided the copyright notice and licence text are retained. The Pro features and the market data relay are commercial offerings documented at leek.fund, and the repository does not state how the Pro tier is licensed, so if you intend to depend on Pro functionality in a commercial setting, confirm the terms directly rather than inferring them from the open source licence. Nothing here is legal advice.

Editorial conclusion

Adopt LeekFund if you already live in VS Code or Cursor and want A-share, Hong Kong, US, futures or fund quotes in the status bar without switching windows, and if you accept that it is a display tool with no trading. Skip it if you need order placement, if you are not a user of the VS Code ecosystem, or if a third-party market data API being unreachable would leave you blind. Before installing, check the Marketplace entry for giscafer.leek-fund and confirm your editor version satisfies the engines field, and read the market data relay documentation if your network blocks the upstream quote APIs.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. LeekHub/leek-fund on GitHub
2. License: BSD-3-Clause
3. Project website
4. README
5. Releases