MailBag May 01, 2015 at 05:27 AM
StockCharts carries several commodity symbols from Bloomberg that chartists can use to track individual commodities and commodity groups. These can be found by searching the symbol catalog for "Bloomberg and index" (without quotation marks). The image below shows a sampling of these symbols. The list starts with the Bloomberg Commodity Index, which consists of six commodity groups and twenty-one different commodities. This is the Bloomberg equivalent of the CRB Index ($CRB). Before looking at the components, note that symbols ending with "TR" represent a "total Read More
MailBag April 24, 2015 at 08:03 AM
Chartists can measure the difference between price and a moving average using the Percent Change Tool and the Percentage Price Oscillator (PPO). Knowing how far above or below a stock is from its moving average can help determine if it is overextended or if momentum is accelerating. Let's look at a 50-day simple moving average using Citrix as an example. The Percent Change Tool can be found when annotating a SharpChart. The icon is in the middle of the top row under the auto support-resistance icon (green-red line). Click, drag and extend this tool to measure the difference Read More
MailBag April 10, 2015 at 04:26 AM
While we cannot plot the complete shape of the futures curve, chartists can plot the difference between near-term futures prices and forward futures prices to find out if market structure is in contango or backwardation. This is important to markets like oil because market structure reflects current and future demand prospects. In general, market structure is contango when near-term futures prices are lower than the more distant futures prices. For example, contango would be present if May Light Crude (^CLK15) was priced below October Light Crude (^CLK15). Backwardation Read More
MailBag April 07, 2015 at 08:48 PM
There is an interesting little technique that can help you save a writer's annotations when you save the chart into your own ChartList. Here is how I do it. In the Don't Ignore This Chart article from last week, Arthur highlighted some simple support / resistance areas. Here is the chart. Now, if you wanted to save that chart without Arthur's annotations, just click on it and use the save menu at the top centre of the chart. You can see I used the Save As tool. This will erase the annotations though. To keep Read More
MailBag April 03, 2015 at 02:52 PM
There are several ways chartists can use the StockCharts Technical Rank (SCTR) to find winning stocks and ETFs. First, note that we have SCTRs for US large-caps, US mid-caps, US small-caps, Toronto stocks and ETFs. Leveraged and inverse ETFs are excluded from the ETF group. The securities in each group are ranked against each other. The rankings, therefore, do not overlap and are not comparable outside the group. The SCTRs in each group range from zero to one hundred. Using large-caps as an example, stocks scoring between zero and ten would be in the bottom Read More
