How to read us stock market?

Reading a stock chart shows you the present and past prices, and can also help clue you in on what’s happening in the broader market. Understanding how stock charts work is a key step in becoming a better investor.

A stock chart is a graph that displays the price of a stock—or any type of investment asset—over a period of time. It typically shows the current price, historical highs and lows, and trading volumes.

A stock chart’s y-axis tracks prices and its x-axis tracks time periods—from minutes and hours to months and years. By analyzing how a stock’s price has changed over time, investors can identify trends and patterns that inform their strategy.

The bar graph at the bottom of a stock chart tracks trading volume, which measures the number of shares of stock that are bought and sold in a given time period. Volume represents how much demand there is for a particular stock.

Investors often watch for big spikes in trading volume, as they tend to coincide with insider or institutional buying, important news or a change in a stock’s trend or pattern.

Stock charts typically include data on a company’s underlying business metrics, commonly referred to as a company’s “fundamentals.” Investors use metrics like revenue, earnings per share (EPS) and free cash flow for fundamental analysis of a stock.

Fundamental analysis involves analyzing a stock by comparing its business fundamentals to its stock price and attempting to identify value. One popular fundamental analysis metric is price-to-earnings ratio, which is calculated by dividing a stock’s share price by its EPS. The lower a stock’s P/E ratio, the more attractive it may be to value investors.

Technical analysis is an alternative to fundamental analysis that is focused purely on a stock’s past price movement. Technical analysis involves recognizing patterns or trends in a stock chart and using them to predict future price movement.

Technical traders often identify support and resistance levels in a stock chart, which are price ranges at which a stock is likely to change direction. Many technical traders also use other price and volume-derived indicators, such as moving averages, Bollinger Bands and oscillators to identify potential buy and sell points.

There are a variety of stock chart styles. Line charts, candlestick charts and bar charts are among the most common styles—each provide investors with a different way of looking at similar information, including opening and closing prices as well as intraday highs and lows.

In a candlestick chart, the opening and closing prices of a period are represented by the body of each candle. The intraperiod highs and lows are represented by the “wicks” or “shadows” of the candle, vertical lines that extend out from the tops and bottom of the candle body.

In a bar chart, the intraperiod trading range is represented by a vertical line, and the opening and closing prices are represented by horizontal notches that extend out from the vertical line to the left and right, respectively.

Traders use stock charts to identify patterns that tend to signal a future price move in one direction or another.

For example, a double or triple top or bottom is a commonly used reversal pattern. When a stock in an established trend “bounces off” a particular level two or three times without continuing past it, it can be a signal the stock’s trend is reversing.

A cup with handle pattern is created when a stock makes a large U-shaped dip followed by a slight downward pullback, forming a shape that looks like a teacup with a small handle. The cup with handle pattern is typically considered a bullish signal to buy a stock.

Stock traders also watch for stocks to break outside established patterns.

When a stock has been trading in a pattern such as a channel, a triangle or a flag pattern, a breakout of that pattern in one direction or another can indicate the direction of the breakout will be the new longer-term trend for the stock.

Traders look for high trading volume to confirm a true breakout has occurred.

Traders use stock charts and technical analysis as their primary means of determining when to buy and sell stocks. Long-term investors use stock charts to get a general sense of a stock’s price trend or relative performance.

Joel Elconin, co-host of Benzinga’s PreMarket Prep and co-founder of PreMarketprep.com market research firm, says it’s easy to get overwhelmed with technical analysis, so new traders should keep things simple.

“Many investors overcomplicate technical analysis and can end up with analysis paralysis,” Elconin says.

“I try to keep it simple for short-to-medium term trading and focus on easy patterns, such as double and triple tops and bottoms and multiple closes at the same level.”

In addition, Elconin says traders should understand that fundamental news, such as an earnings beat or a CEO departure, will typically have a larger influence on stock price movement than technical patterns or trends. These headlines are often unpredictable, so traders should never commit too heavily to technical patterns.

Individual stock charts give investors a great deal of insight into a stock’s past performance and its potential future performance. However, comparing two different stock charts can offer even greater insights into the stock and the overall market.

Ryan Johnson, a chartered financial analyst (CFA) and managing director of investments for Buckingham Advisors, says investors should take advantage of the overlapping stock charts function on free platforms such as Stockcharts.com and Yahoo Finance.

“We suggest not just looking at a stock’s price chart, but looking at a stock price in comparison to that stock’s sector ETF or a broader stock market index overall,” Johnson says.

“We feel it is important to judge your investment performance not only on a total return basis but also in comparison to alternatives in the marketplace.”

Stock charts are a key tool for all investors, but the best way to use them depends largely on an individual investor’s goals, risk tolerance, trading style and investing time horizon.

Darren Colananni, certified financial planner (CFP) and wealth management advisor at Centurion Wealth Management, says investors should make sure to look at a stock’s chart on multiple time frames to get a better understanding of short, medium and long-term trends. However, he says long-term investors shouldn’t put too much emphasis on stock charts.

If you already have a good foundational knowledge of investing and want to improve your stock-picking acumen, read on.

Getting started with investing can seem intimidating, or for some, downright terrifying. But you’ll need to know how to read and understand stock charts if you want to make informed decisions when buying individual stocks.

In this article, I’ll break down the essentials of a stock chart and explain the key things you need to focus on. By the end of this useful guide, terms like “dividend,” “trendline,” and “lines of support” won’t sound so foreign.

Simply put, a stock chart is a graph that shows you the price of a stock over a specific period of time — for example, five years. More advanced stock charts will show additional data, and by understanding the basics you can pull out a lot of information about a stock’s historic, current, and expected performance.

Now let’s take a look at a typical stock chart. For the sake of this article, let’s use Apple as an example stock, as displayed on Yahoo! Finance.

If you don’t already know, the series of letters after the name of the company is the ticker symbol. It identifies the company on the stock exchange.

In this case, I’ll search for AAPL, which is Apple’s ticker symbol. This is what we get:

Next, click the ‘Full screen’ link in the top right corner of the chart to expand it.

I’ve also taken the liberty of filtering to the last 15 years, which you can easily do by changing the date range near the top of the expanded chart.

So here we’re looking at the last 15 years of Apple’s stock. I bet you wish you would have invested in Apple in late 2008/early 2009!

Now let’s dive into the different pieces and parts of the stock chart so you can begin to read one like a pro.

A stock chart becomes particularly useful when you know how to read its information and decipher what it’s showing so you can make more accurate predictions about how the stock will perform in the future.

Here are the four key data points you need to understand in order to fully leverage the power of a stock chart.

This is that blue line you see every time you hear about a stock — it’s either going up or down, right? While the trendline seems like common sense, there are a few things I want to call out so you can understand it in a little more detail.

First, know that stocks will take huge dives and also make huge climbs. Don’t react to large drops or huge gains in a positive or negative way. You should be using this piece of the stock chart merely to see what’s going on.

In fact, the trendline should lead you to dig further. For instance, Apple as a company really took off from 2009 to 2012.

But what happened from 2012 to 2013? The stock began to sink — at one point, shares were down more than 40%!

This is where your trendline comes in handy. News comes and goes, but when news coincides with a dramatic shift in the trendline, it’s something to pay attention to.

If you saw something like this happen, I’d urge you to find out what’s going on with the company. Most strong companies can rebound from hits like this, but not all can.

For those who don’t know, right around this time Apple experienced a few major shifts:

First, its longtime CEO, Steve Jobs, resigned in 2011. Then around 2012, Apple noted that its profit margins were significantly decreasing, despite a growing smartphone market. Finally, they were trying to expand the smartphone into developing countries, where they were just too expensive to compete.

These factors, combined with plenty of other variables, contributed to the stock price falling.

But new CEO Tim Cook made some strategic moves with the company to turn it around, and the rest of the trendline shows that.

The lesson here is to use your trendline as a first-glance, high-level indicator of something to look into.

Next, you’ll want to identify lines of support and resistance. A line of support is a price that a stock is unlikely to drop below, while a line of resistance is one that it’s unlikely to go above. That is, until some major change occurs, such as a reduced profit margin.

Think of these lines as bumpers at a bowling alley. When you’re bowling, the ball bounces back and forth between these inflated barriers.

A stock’s price does the same thing within these lines of support and resistance.

The goal here is to know when to buy and when to sell. Let’s take a look at Apple’s stock chart again to see an example:

These are subjective and interpreted differently by everyone, but the process is important. Note that everyone will draw lines of resistance and support differently, depending on their investment horizon (how long they plan to hold the stock).

So, if you plan on holding it for a long time, you may not draw as many lines of support and resistance, because you don’t care as much about the ups and downs. But if you’re a short-term investor, you may draw more to analyze trends during a shorter period.

Let me break down the image above with each of the trendlines:

If it seems complex, don’t fret. It is. And a lot of it is guesswork.

Knowing the lines of resistance can help you decide when to buy or sell a stock. Remember, though, that it’s subjective and it won’t give you a clear-cut road map on exactly what to do. You’ll have to use some of your own analysis and judgment.

At the bottom of the chart, you’ll see if and when the company issued a dividend, as well as if there was ever a stock split:

A dividend is when the company (the board of directors) decides to give a portion of its earnings back to its shareholders.  If you own the stock, you get a small chunk of the profit.

Some companies issue dividends, some don’t. Just because a company does or doesn’t issue a dividend doesn’t mean it’s not worth investing in. There are plenty of other factors to consider.

Some companies just prefer to focus on growth, so they’ll reinvest their earnings as opposed to giving them back to the shareholders. Other companies (like Apple) can pay dividends without sacrificing growth.

As you can see by the image, Apple started issuing quarterly dividends to its shareholders midway through 2012.

You can also see that there were stock splits in 2014 and 2020. A stock split is a strategic move done by the company’s board of directors to issue more shares of stock to the public.

In 2014, Apple did a seven to one stock split (noted as 7:1), which means that for every share of AAPL you owned prior to the split, you’d now have seven. So if you owned 100 shares of APPL prior to the split, you’d now have 700.

The value of the company doesn’t change, but the share price might. Companies will often do this if the price isn’t in line with competitors or to attract smaller investors (if the share price decreases).

You can see the uptick in the trendline after the split occurred, too. Many times when a stock split happens, more people invest (since the share price is often lower) which increases demand and, in many cases, the overall share price.

At the very bottom of the chart, you can see many small, vertical lines. This is a trend of the volumes at which the stock is traded.

Volumes are good to know, but shouldn’t be your only determining factor when buying a stock. Usually, trading volumes increase when there is major news (good or bad) about the company.

When volumes are increasing, it can also shift the price of the stock quickly. Let’s look at an example:

In Line A, you can see there was a high volume of trading activity that corresponded with a drop in the stock price. There may have been news that day that caused people to panic (aside from the entire economy crashing that year).

In Line B, you can see a slight uptick in trading volume that corresponds with an upward trend in the stock price.

Don’t always assume there will be a correlation between stock price and trading volume, but it’s good to know what the volumes have been in the past and what they are currently before making a decision.

With high volumes comes greater ease when buying or selling. If a lot of people are trading the stock that day, you should be able to buy or sell it quickly.

Once you’re comfortable reading a stock chart and you feel like you have the basics down, you might be looking for a more powerful investment tool. Here are some great options.

E*TRADE is incredibly powerful and hits the mark when you want to take advantage of robust stock charts and trading tools. Their tools are lightyears above the rest when it comes to trading.

No, their pricing isn’t the best and their platform isn’t as *sexy* as some others, but when you really want to get into technical analysis, E*TRADE is the way to go.

Where E*TRADE gives you all the bells and whistles, some people may not need all of that. Robinhood’s app does an excellent job of giving you just enough information to start to make more informed decisions.

No, you can’t get as granular as I did above using the app, but you may not need to. Or, maybe you’ve already done your research on a Google Finance stock chart and just want to check in on how the stock is performing. Either way, Robinhood is an excellent platform with great trading tools.

No matter what level investor you are, TD Ameritrade can work for you. You’ll pay nothing for access to any of TD Ameritrade‘s trading platforms, streaming news, and expert research.

Plus, you’ll have access to TD Ameritrade’s thinkorswim platform, which is a professional-level trading platform that gives you tools to perform stock analysis and watch for potential risks and rewards.

Public makes stock trading a social event — literally. When you use Public, you’ll have access to a community of investors — both long-time, experienced investors and beginner investors. This allows you to chat with others and get a sense of which investing strategy may work best for you.

Besides this feature, Public also gives you access to stocks for as little as $5. They offer fractional shares, so even if you want to invest in a high-end company like Amazon, you don’t have to spend thousands.

• Identify the trendline. This is that blue line you see every time you hear about a stock — it's either going up or down, right? .
• Look for lines of support and resistance.
• Know when dividends and stock splits occur.
• Understand historic trading volumes.