Greg Schnell

Area charts are just another way of displaying a line chart for stocks. They are commonly used on TV to help the viewer distinguish the price line more clearly. Area charts also offer a unique style that is different from a daily chart with candlesticks. One of the nice parts about charting is creating attractive, colorful charts that you enjoy looking at to review.

Selling stocks for a loss is part of technical trading. Obviously, the preference is to sell stocks when they’re winners. The worst trades are the ones that immediately reverse when you enter into them and take you to a loss position. Taking small losses rather than large losses is akin to paper cuts versus amputations.

Managing your trades is a constant job for a good trader. You can use technical clues to help you make optimal trading decisions. After a stock has drifted sideways to down, a few key technical events happen: The stock touches an important moving average. Some of those are the 10-week moving average, 20-week moving average, and 40-week moving average.

After you’ve determined your portfolio’s goals, you can set up personal scans and alerts to help you monitor your portfolio hourly, daily, or less frequently; the frequency depends on your goals. If you’re actively trading each day or week, you’ll check this information much more frequently than if you’re managing a longer-term portfolio.

Focusing on strong stocks is one of the most important themes of the market. Usually those strong stocks are part of a strong sector. You have multiple methods of finding strong stocks and sectors with technical analysis. StockCharts technical ranking (SCTR) Performance chart using sector exchange-traded funds (ETFs) Relative Rotation Graph (RRG) tool All three of these tools are available if you’re a member of StockCharts.

In your stock adventures, you may need a custom weekly line chart. The image you see below (depicting the stock of Valero Energy, or VLO) shows an initial setup of your ChartStyle for line charts. These are the choices you need to consider: Relative strength indicators against the rest of the market can be helpful on a weekly line chart.

What is weird price action? There’s no singular definition for weird price action when it comes to stocks, but subtle changes in the market can serve as nice clues. Here are some examples: Large outsized candles either up or down become reference candles for future bars to compare against. Tiny candles called dojis, where the market opens and closes at almost the same level, with very little range between the high and the low, show indecision.

Before you jump into stocks, it’s a good idea to understand the breadth of three different exchanges: the NASDAQ Stock Exchange, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), and the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSE). The NASDAQ composite breadth The NASDAQ composite ($COMPQ) is the name for all of the NASDAQ listed stocks compiled together.

You can start a chart by going to StockCharts.com, typing a stock symbol under Create a SharpChart, and clicking Go. To create an area chart, locate the Chart Attributes area in the settings panel. Using the Type drop-down menu, select Area from the list and click Update in the lower-left corner. This makes your area chart show up extremely bold, probably in black.