Every year, the readers of Technical Analysis of Stock and Commodities magazine holds its "Readers' Choice Awards" survey.  Each year the categories change somewhat and the winners in each category shift around some, but each year for the past 7 years now, StockCharts.com has won the award for "Best Technical Analysis Web Site".   Last week, I was thrilled when I learned that once again we've won this award for 2008. Because the award is given based on unsolicited votes from the magazine's readers, I think it has real merit and the idea that many of TASC's readers use our Read More 

Check out the following chart: If it takes a moment to download, don't worry.  I'll wait.  Even as a snapshot, this chart's a very big file.  In fact, you'll need to click on it to see its true size. Is it there yet?  Good! <ahem> "THIS CHART IS A USELESS WASTE OF TIME FOR EVERYONE IT TOUCHES!"(Sorry, I needed to get that off my chest.) This chart is one of the largest charts we sent out today.  It was also one of the slowest - taking us almost 2 seconds to generate it and over 8 seconds to send it out to the user that Read More 

So this weekend is a "newsletter weekend" - i.e., it's one of the two weekends each month where we publish our free electronic newsletter "ChartWatchers".  In the past - before we started using these blogs - subscribers would have to wait until "ChartWatchers" showed up in their mailbox to read any of its content.  Sometimes, for a variety of reasons, we couldn't send out the newsletter until late in the weekend even though most of it was completed much earlier.  Basically, the newsletter had to be completely done before anyone could read any of it. Now however Read More 

Don't believe me?  Check out some of the entries on the Pingdom Outages Blog.  Pingdom is an independent service that we've recently started using to monitor our website so that our users can quickly see if we are up or down and how often we have problems.  (Here's our current Pingdom report.)  So far, knock on wood, StockCharts.com has managed to avoid getting written up on Pingdom's Outages Blog but it's sobering to see the large number of popular sites that do have entries there.  We've had problems in the past and we may well have them again some day - but Read More 

In this morning's New York Times, there is an article about the advice people are getting from stock analysts.  That advice can be summed up in one word: "Buy."  Even in the worst market, literally, in history.  Stock market analysts continue to issue way more buy recommendations than anything else.  From the article: On Oct. 8, as Congress and the Treasury Department frantically tried to calm the plummeting markets, a Citigroup analyst upgraded Bank of America to buy. Since then, Bank of America shares have fallen 77 percent. This Read More