Once a long time ago, the Swedish stock exchange held on to itself. It was in the late 1960s and 1970s when the private fledged stock market and several of the private bank firms were taken over by primarily Skanska / SHB. If one were to find something positive about that time then it was that there were so few listed companies that there were no problems to carry a stock market diagram by hand. But nothing lasts forever.

During the 1980s, the stock exchange had a restart and new bank companies began to pop up as mushrooms. First in line was Sven Hagströmer. With a stock market that began to grow, more and more companies began to be listed. Suddenly it became difficult and expensive – time-consuming – to draw your own charts by hand. Not only because of more companies but also because of that everything started to move faster. The traditional weekly charts had to be supplemented with day charts.

At the same time, a technology lift started. The PC entered its market and with the PC came the technical analysis programs. As usual, USA led the development and one of the big ones was in the beginning Computrac. But just as in the war, with technology you have to beware of going first or last if you want to survive. Computrac was a program that was taken to Sweden by the company Delphi Economics. Erland Holmlund tested the program and that resulted in a list of suggestions for improvements. But it was tough to bring changes “over there”. The solutions was to make an own program instead;  the Vikingen was born. A program with a more modern programming language, Delphi 1.

The stock chart program Vikingen came to be one of the larger PC programs developed in Sweden. Vikingen was first presented at the investment fair in 1986 in Stockholm. You had to enter digits by yourself in to get printed graphs with price and fundamental data. The next step was to implement an automatic daily update that costed hundreds of thousands plus at that time!

To begin with, a man on a motorcycle fetched the stock market list from the stock exchange at Stortorget in Stockholm to Uppsala,  after closing time. In Uppsala, the prices were entered manually. But through a cooperation with Paul Östling at Aktievisonen, the process could be automated and the price shrunk to a few thousand! The program was a success and started a development work that never seems to end. “Mr Vikingen”, Erland Holmlund, managed the development, with the help of a group of active users who could not get enough of opportunities for analysis.

Some of a standstill in the development occurred after Delphi Economics, year 2000, was sold to Henrik Jönsson. A deal that was about to end with a disaster. But after a clean-up year when Vikingen returned to the old owners, it was time to find a “safe” port for the program and it became Avanza Bank with AvanzaVikingen. But the task became too great and the development of the program did not take off.

It would be necessary for an old Vikingen fan and his boss, interested in the stock exchange, to get hold of the program.  Then the development began again.  Björn Lindström’s Addiva bought Vikingen and together with Peter Östevik, led the reconstruction of  Vikingen. A new operative system called Windows 7 made it necessary to lift the program to a 32 bit level. Peter Östevik who previously worked at Delphi Economics and who is perhaps best known for the educational videos he has produced.

With Addiva Vikingen got a new port and already several generations of  Vikingen have seen the light of day. We are today many in the fan club who keep their fingers crossed for Peter Östevik to succeed in restoring the program’s historical status; the times when the Viking ended up top of stock chart programs, both in Swedish and in international evaluations of technical analysis programs.

Per Holmlund, 2012

After 2012

Many millions of SEK have been put into the development of Vikingen. Björn Lindström made sure that the interface became more modern.  A MAC version was also launched. Peter has held hundreds of courses and webinars. NPInvestor in Denmark with Lars Persson succeeded in establishing Vikingen as the best analysis program in Denmark. Axel Steuch has written two books based on Vikingen, on how to get rich with the help of the stock market.

To get a better quality of USA price data, the supplier was changed to Milliestream, 2015, from SIX Telegroup.

A big step came in 2017, also being able to pay per month. In 2018, a new website was launched and several new subscribers were added. Mini Vikingen was launced in 2018 in Denmark, a less expensive program. More funds, several thousends were added in 2019.