What does a charting service do that a PC doesn ?
Charts generally contain a fair amount of fundamental information such as sales, dividends, prior growth rates, institutional ownership. • Can I draw my own charts? Of course. For example, if you only want to follow a handful of mutual funds of stocks, charting on a weekly basis is easy enough. EMAs are also easy enough to compute, but will take a while to overcome the lack of a suitable starting value. • What about wedges, exhaustion gaps, breakaway gaps, coils, saucer bottoms, and all those other weird formations? The answer is beyond the scope of this FAQ article. Such patterns can be seen, particularly if you have a good imagination. Many believe they are not reliable. There is some discussion in Murphy [ref 1]. • Are there any aspects of technical analysis that don’t seem quite so much like hokum or tea leaf reading? The oscillator set known as “stochastics” (a bit of a misnomer) is based on the observation that a stock which is advancing will tend to close nearer to the high of t
