>>Be interested to hear about any free (or inexpensive) charting tools that other people are using.
Mike,
I use Worden's Telechart 2000. The software costs around $35, and I have seen it as low as $18 in IBD. Each day I down load data for my 37 issues I follow.
The cost is .19 each day at this point for the data. When I first down loaded the charts I chose how many years worth of data I wanted. If I get five years I get the initial chart for $1, if less than 5 yrs I pay .39 year year. (this is off the top of my head and I don't pay too much attention to the pricing since it's pretty cheap, so far).
The program is a little clunky. It's Dos but I can run it while in Windows95 but not in a window. Menue driven not object oriented or pull down windows I guess is another way of saying it.
The screen display is nice and crisp. I have about nine indicators to choose from,
Relative Strength, Moving Averages, Envelope Averages, Linear Regression, Rate of Change, Time Segmented Volume, On balance Vol., Vol Bars, Stochastics, Relative Strength Index, MACD, Balance of Power, And Money Stream.
The last two are Worden's own creations.
There are a few other things you can do like draw a trend line, or spot support and resistance with a line. You can also adjust the chart for daily, every two, three, four...to nine day views. Arith. or Log view. And some other stuff.
I use the thing mostly to keep a visual reference of my portfolio and other stocks I track. I am not comfortable with TA as yet, have read some books and still wondering whether it's a lot of bush-wha or worth spending the time to learn. I am leaning toward the "learn this stuff dummy, it couldn't hurt" end of the scale.
I think there is something to predicting the future by seeing the past, although I think this is better done with Fundemental Analysis and TA only reflects the markets view, and their view is Fundemental. The market in this case are the large firms buying huge blocks of the big stocks. PHd's and the like with Fund institutions and companies like Value Line, S&P, etc (I lumped a bunch of vocatins into that but you get the point).
Those folks use Harvard/Yale, etc "MBA" - business sense to make their choices and when a stock drops it's because they said it didn't meet earning's expectaions by a pennie or two. Or in the case of recent history the companies came out and announced the future as they sw it and the market reacted before the usual down grading by the fund managers.
TA will not tell you that a company is in trouble until after the carnage is over.
Anyway, there you have my two cents worth. I think TA is an interesting tool and look forward to understanding it more.
Hope my explanation of Worden's program helps.
Regards
Jim |
