Sector and Industry Groups Come to StockCharts.com

We've been working hard the past couple of weeks to get better Sector and Industry classifications for the stocks in our database and today that work is finally starting to surface on the web site.

One of the big problems with Sector and Industry classifications is that there is no universally accepted standard for what constitutes a sector, what constitutes an industry and which stocks belong in which category.  The other big problem was that, until recently, the only source for that information was high-priced research firms that usually frowned on our request to make their classifications publicly available on our website.

Recently however Google has started publishing categorizations that they have derived from their search engine logic.  The Google classifications are very similar to the "typical" categories that most people are used to and the Google classifications have the additional advantage of not having the typical restrictions on republication.

So we are now - finally(!) - able to offer a broad set of Sector and Industry classifications for many of the stocks that we track.  We are now providing that information for over 5,000 different US stocks.  There are a couple of ways that information can be used:

• If you select the "Full Quote" option for any SharpChart, you will now see the Sector and Industry classification for that chart in the upper left corner of the Full Quote area:
  
   
• Extra members can also use our Advanced Scan Workbench to add Sector and/or Industry categories to their scans via the "Sectors and Industries" dropdown:
  
  
• (Coming very soon!) User-defined Scan Results now include the Sector and Industry of each stock that is returned by the scan.

(Note for Extra Users: If you have been using our old "SPGICS" sector and industry codes in your saved scans, we'll automatically updated them so that they use our new Sector/Industry codes instead.)

We will continue to look for ways to expand both the number of stocks that we can reliably classify as well as the different ways Sector and Industy information can improve our charts and our scans.  We're looking into adding new MarketCarpets, CandleGlance Groups, Bullish Percent Indexes and more.  Stay tuned...