Intraday Stock Charts

Intraday Stock Data involves reporting every individual price change that a certain contract may have. Rather than show changes over the course of several days, Intraday Data shows fluctuations that occur in a single day. This makes sense because the word "intraday" literally means "within the day".

For these reasons, Intraday Stock Data is useful for people who want to do something called backtesting their trading system. It is also important for short-term or day-traders who wish to make a bunch of trades during any given trading period. These traders pay really close attention to any intraday price changes which in turn may lead to benefiting from super quick changes in the price.

As an fictitious example, let's say that last Tuesday, during trading during the day, Starbucks' common stock fell to an intraday low of $25 before closing at $25.23.

The term "intraday" is also used sometimes to describe securities that trade on the markets during regular business hours, such as ETFs and stocks, as opposed to mutual funds, which must be purchased from a dealer.

The Intraday Stock Charts are typically shown as bar graphs and are broken down into time increments like one minute, five minutes, 10 minutes, 30 minutes, one hour, and a full day. In general, each chart is rather limited in how far back it can show data for. Most show data for just the past two to 10 or so days. But for those wanting more information on their stocks, historical intraday charts may often be easily attainable at various financial reporting websites or sometimes even as part of a package presented by your paid broker.

Intraday is typically used to describe the latest lows and highs of a security. As an example, saying something had a "new intraday low" means the security fell to a new low when compared to other prices during the particular trading time. When referring to intraday highs, they may sometimes be the same as the closing price.