A picture is worth a thousand words.
The use of a simple picture can tell you the story of a complex topic — and that’s especially true when it comes to investing in the stock market. But for many new investors, it can be hard to find free charts for investing. Many professional investors use expensive charting software and subscriptions to build stock charts, but most traders don’t need those.
Instead, there are a lot of free charts for investing that you can find online. Here are some of the best free investing charts:
StockCharts.com
StockCharts.com is my favorite investing chart tool. Maybe I’m biased because 
this was the first charting program that I learned how to use, but I also find it to be the easiest. StockCharts.com also has one of the larger selection of free charts, and they also have an API that you can use with Excel to build macros off of. This can be handy if you want to use the stock chart as one of many different factors.
On StockCharts.com, you can can build:
- SharpCharts (Candlestick, Line, Renko, Kagi, Ichimoku, OHLC Bar Charts)
- Point and figure Charts
- PerfCharts
- CandleGlance Groups
- Gallery Charts
- Market Carpets
I’m an old-school-point-and-figure-chart kind of guy, and StockCharts.com has the best point and figure charts available for free. You can impose moving averages and custom settings on the chart, and the best part is that it’s free!
BigCharts
BigCharts from MarketWatch is a good charting solution, but it doesn’t give you the technical details for free. You can put together basic and interactive charts for securities, but in order to do technical charts, like point and figure, you need to pay for their technical chart subscription service.
However, if you’re looking for a basic chart for looking at price histories, BigCharts offers a good solution.
ThinkorSwim
ThinkorSwim isn’t a charting program, but a trading platform. If you’re looking to do trading, ThinkorSwim is the best platform for you. It’s actually a platform that was acquired by TD Ameritrade, but don’t let that stop you. The platform itself is still free if you open an account, and you can open an account with little money to invest. Plus, they don’t charge any account fees, maintenance fees, or inactivity fees. So, you can simply set up your account to use their trading platform for the charts if you’d like. However, I use ThinkorSwim, and I’m a fan of their trading platform as well. You can find my guide to ThinkorSwim here.
Major Finance Sites
All of the major finance websites also offer free charts for investing, but once again, they are basic charts that don’t include any technical features. You can find basic stock charts on:
Every one of these sites offers a lot of the same, but they can be useful charts to show price trends and history.
The Most Interesting Charts
Sometimes you don’t want to put together your own charts for investing. Instead, you rather see interesting charts that others put together. I like to follow StockTwits Charts, which posts the best charts from the StockTwits network. Now you can see what other traders are looking at and building without having to do any of the work yourself.
Yes, it may not be a chart-building tool, but it is a useful investing chart tool.
Where do you find your charts for investing?
Robert Farrington is America’s Millennial Money Expert® and America’s Student Loan Debt Expert™, and the founder of The College Investor, a personal finance site dedicated to helping millennials escape student loan debt to start investing and building wealth for the future. You can learn more about him here.
He regularly writes about investing, student loan debt, and general personal finance topics geared towards anyone wanting to earn more, get out of debt, and start building wealth for the future.
He has been quoted in major publications including the New York Times, Washington Post, Fox, ABC, NBC, and more. He is also a regular contributor to Forbes.
krantcents says
I create my own charts! I just had a conversation with an art teacher of how it is used post school. Visual representations are a great way of communicating.
Robert says
Never tried it, but now I’m going to!
Deb says
I just tried Point & Figure charts on StockCharts.com for the SPY, and it wouldn’t allow me to choose any period less than a day. In P&F, it is common to use 30-min or 1-hr periods. I’m wondering if you have to pay their exorbitant fees in order to get access to the more common time periods for P&F charts?