When you first start investing in shares, you will soon appreciate that there are quite a few tools at your disposal to help you make better investment decisions. You can look at level 2 prices, you can look through the financial accounts of all the companies on your shortlist, and you can look at price charts to help you find some nice oversold stocks.
It is actually price charts that I want to talk about in this blog post because I think every share trader should at least know how you can use charts when investing. What I like about price charts is that they are widely available, and although you can pay for live streaming price charts, they are often available free of charge.
For instance if you read this Zecco Trading review, you will notice that live charts are easily accessible after you have an account with them. In fact this is actually the case with virtually any stockbroker that you come across online.
If you read reviews of any other brokers, including this review of Tradeking, you will observe that you do not really need to get your charts from a third party provider. You can simply access them through your broker, which is really convenient.
So are these charts any good, and can they improve your overall stock market profits?
Well the first thing that I would say is that you can easily make money without using charts. Warren Buffett, for instance, does not spend his life looking through stock charts before making investment decisions. He will be more interested in the long term prospects of various companies.
Of course he may glance at the chart to see how the share price has moved in recent times, and whether or not it is trading at low levels. However I don’t think he makes use of the widely available technical indicators, like so many investors do.
I personally believe that technical analysis has it’s merits, but these indicators are better suited to short or medium term investors. For example if you want to make profits over the course for a few weeks or months, then your entry price is critical and you will almost certainly want to buy stocks when they are trading at bargain levels according to certain technical indicators.
If you are investing for the long term, as is the case with Warren Buffett, then your original purchase price is not as important. Providing that the chosen company is increasing it’s profits and it’s dividend payouts each year, then the price is likely to continue trending upwards, so your original entry point is not that significant to your overall gains.
So the message I want to convey is that live charts are certainly very useful for short and medium term investors because timing is very important. However if you are buying shares for several years, then the price charts may only be glanced at before you make the decision when to buy.
