Online stock charts tips

The Internet is full of stock market websites with online stock charts. The main questions are which one to use and whether they are usable for active investors or traders.

There are very popular sites like stock chart dot com or Yahoo Finance or Google interactive charts. Plenty of casual investors use these market websites for checking the development of share prices and the general US market situation.

Should you use some free online trading sites?

The answer to this question depends on your needs and requirements. These online trading websites offer several options of interactive charts. But their options to set technical share price chart are limited. It also means that technical analysis of such free charts could be limited to some functions only.

This IBM chart is an example of such overview type of stock graph:

Most of these websites offer some free charting features together with some premium market charting options. These premium options are sometimes available free after registering. The best online trading site described below offers good features for analysis of free charts for registered users.

Good online trading site with free charts

I found one site with usable free technical charts. This site – FinViz – offers several options including a good market screener. Their charts offer one nice feature. They have some important trendlines and support or resistance lines drawn automatically. It can help.

Another interesting feature is automatic recognizing of chart patterns and candlestick chart patterns. Here is an example of their technical charts.

When to use these free sites for traders

There are good reasons to use some online trading websites. These market websites could be a good option for casual investors that need to check the general market situation and market mood only occasionally. Such online technical charts will do a good job for them.

But a best online trading site with long-term charts and streaming technical charts could also be usable for short-term traders.

You can use FinViz – the best free stock chart site I found – for some scanning purposes. This site offers a really good market screening feature.

I use their technical analysis chart features when I need to check the situation of some stock market symbol quickly. This option is very good in times when I am traveling and I do not want to run my stock analysis software.

I also use their online stock charts for quick technical analysis of such a chart. I notice some stock market ticker in some interesting article I read. I check its technical analysis chart on this best online trading site. It could help me to decide if it is worth of the time to make further technical analysis for my stock trading purposes.

Another aspect that is quite good is that FinViz offers automatic recognition of several important chart patterns and its long-term stock charts are filled with automatic trendlines. It could provide another view of the situation for my technical analysis stock trading needs.

Even best online trading sites have shortcomings

There are plenty of shortcomings on these online trading websites. The main problem is that any online trading site shows you only one chart – only one time frame – for short term or long-term stock charts. I personally like to have visible three different time frames to see also a bigger picture than only the daily or intraday chart of stock trading action.

These trading websites also limit how possible it is to draw trendlines on their long-term online stock charts or stream online stock charts that this site produces. My own trendlines are key tools I use for my technical analysis.