Stock Market Charts

Smart investors closely track trends before making a decision about what direction they expect a stock to move in. Often the best way to follow these trends is with a chart of the share's prices that has been maintained for a reasonable period of time. The total volume of the shares traded during the day and its relation to the day's closing price is also important. Becoming a successful investor requires learning basic skills like how to properly read a stock market chart.

Falling wedge shapes on a chart indicate temporary reverse in upward price rallies. Rising wedges may indicate interruptions of a falling price trend. Technical analysts might define such a breakout wedge pattern as bullish if the breakout occurs above the median line or bearish if it appears below the line.

Comprehensive stock market charts tracks thousands of stocks daily. Charts follow nearly every public company or commodity whose issues are traded in North America. All forex currency pairs are also tracked by major charting companies, as are many international stocks and commodity futures.

Technical indicators such as closing price, trading volume and moving averages are frequently plotted in graphical charts, designed for use by technical analysts working to try and uncover market trends. Charts are offered with intra-day, daily, weekly and monthly time spans to help in historical analysis of specific issues and entire industries or markets.

There are even long-term charts that enable you to view more than 20 years of data and advanced charts that give you the ability to plot earnings, splits and other significant factors like dividend data against price trends.

Intelligent use of stock market charts enables you to much more easily determine where the market is going and how you can most profit from following it there. Paying attention to daily stock market charts gives you valuable data about opening, closing, high and low prices of any stock and about the degree of liquidity -- the number of shares bought and sold -- that the stock has. Historical charts, on the other hand, will help you comprehend the long-term movements of the stock market that are so important to recognize whenever economic history begins repeating itself.