Here Are Some Great Free Charts for Investing Analysis

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:

• Yahoo Finance
• MSN Money
• Google Finance
• Reuters

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?