Free Stockmarket Prices & Charting Software
June 2005
Most investors in the stockmarket want access to prices and charts but don't need to pay for expensive services such as Reuters or Bloomberg. The following are the FREE services that we at InvestorProfit.com use.
- www.advfn.com is one of the better websites for UK prices and charts, and there are many different memberships available including free. We prefer just to use the free service. Note: We have heard via the www.trade2win.com message board that if you take a paid subscription out with ADVFN then the only way to cancel it is via the Royal Mail. In our view this is a cynical trick so be very aware. Read the message board thread here
- www.prophet.net is certainly the Rolls Royce of online data feeds and simply has the best charts in the business. The trouble is that they are only for the US stockmarket. As with advfn they also have different memberships available but again we prefer the free one (15 min delayed prices).
- www.stockcharts.com is another excellent charting site and they like all the others have free and paid for memberships. Again, unfortunately this site is for US stocks only.
- www.yahoo.com has recently upgraded its financial site and it's very good. We use it in two areas;
- To keep track of out positions and valuations using the portfolio application, seen below
- To get quick company profiles for any stocks we're interested in
For example, a friend may well tell you to have a look at ABC stock. But what is the stock, what does it do etc. A quick trip to Yahoo, type in the stock ticker and you'll get all the background information on the stock. It's a very slick service.
Another good thing about the Yahoo site is that it covers the stocks from every world market, not just Wall Street. The image below is a copy of a portfolio using Yahoo.
Free Charting Software
You can spend a lot of money of specialist charting packages but for 90% of traders and investors these are not necessary Two charting packages that always receive excellent reviews are the FREE Medved Quote Tracker and the very low cost Sierra Charts.
Both charting packages need a data feed though which is normally provided for free by your online broker or real-time internet data vendor. On both companies websites they provide exactly whose feeds they can run with.
At InvestorProfit.com we use Medved Quotetracker for our charting with the real-time data provided for free from our broker www.interactivebrokers.co.uk. What we like about this setup is that 5 years ago it would have cost anything up to £1000 a month to run, now it's 100% free!
Learning About Charting
If you're new to the markets or want to learn more about charting and technical analysis then check out the IncredibleCharts.com website for one of the best introductions we've seen - Click Here for more details
The guide as well as giving people new to charting a solid base on which to build it also has sections that will interest even veterans and experts on the art of technical analysis.
Our input on this topic has always been that normally it pays dividends to keep your charting simple. Number crunching and overly complex indicators often create more problems than they solve. The shape of the chart, whether it looks bullish or bearish, normally works the best and this is the area where we’d advise new traders to concentrate on.
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