Overview
I’m Howard Reisman the CEO of Stock Rover. In this video we are going to cover some of Stock Rover’s advanced charting features. I am going to focus on charting a single ticker. A separate video called Comparison Charting will cover charting with multiple tickers.
The topics we are going to cover in this video are Technical charting, Fundamental charting and Events. We will begin with Technical charting.
Technical Charting
So, let’s begin by switching to chart mode. Let’s select our dataset, let’s use the Dow 30. Let’s select Boeing as our target company, and we have a 2-year period selected. Let’s work with that.
To access the technicals menu, you click on the technicals button and check the technicals you want. The first one and the most popular technical indicators is the Simple Moving Average or SMA. If we check that, we can now see the SMA 50-day average and 150-day average lines are drawn.
We can change the number of days to use for the averaging periods via the menu. We can also change the number of averaging periods to draw. So, let’s create three averaging lines, a 20 day, a 100 day and a 200 day.
Here you can see each of the lines drawn in a different color. As you change the time periods, the lines are redrawn accordingly.
So, here’s a 5-year chart. Here’s a 1-year chart.
Some investors prefer the exponential moving average which weights recent days more heavily than days further in the past. So, to do this we simply go back to the Technicals menu uncheck the Simple Moving Average and then check the Exponential Moving Average. Like the Simple Moving Average, you can select how many lines to draw and how many days to average for the exponential moving average.
Stock Rover also has Bollinger bands. Bollinger Bands show where the price lives relative to the price movement of the last 20 days, using 2 standard deviations as the band width. Both the number of days and the number of standard deviations are settable. For example lets change the bands to a 30 day period and a 3 standard deviation spread.
The next set of technicals all show as secondary charts. First up is the Moving Average Convergence Divergence or MACD. Let’s create the MACD chart for Boeing.
The MACD is a complex indicator. One line, known as the MACD line, is drawn as the difference between a fast and slow exponential moving average or EMA. The default periods are 12 days for the fast and 26 days for the slow. These periods can be changed to whatever you like. A second line, known as the signal line, which by default is the 9-day EMA is also drawn. When MACD crosses above the signal line it is considered a buy signal. The MACD crossing below the signal line signals a sell.
With all secondary charts such as the MACD, you can change the parameters that drive the chart via the hamburgers. You can also delete the chart altogether by clicking on the X. Two additional technical indicators are the Relative Strength index or RSI and the Money Flow Index or MFI. For the purposes of this video I’ll show the RSI, but both can be drawn together. Both the RSI and MFI are used help determine whether a stock is oversold or overbought by looking at recent daily gains vs. losses. The MFI weights days with higher volume more heavily whereas the RSI does not. The scale ranges from 0 to 100 and the general rule of thumb is values over 70 indicate overbought conditions whereas under 30 means oversold conditions. The last technical is Volume. To better illustrate this chart, I am going to switch to a 3-month period. There are two options with this chart. The first is to draw the moving average line and the second is to color up and down days in different colors.
Fundamentals
Let’s delete these charts as we switch over to Fundamentals. Change the period to 10 years. Fundamental charts mean charting things beyond price, such as P E, revenue, net income, price to book and debt to equity. In Stock Rover, both the Premium and Premium Plus plans allow you to chart from hundreds of fundamental metrics.
By default, the Fundamentals menu shows you popular fundamentals. However, you can select from a much wider palette of metrics. You can search for metrics by typing text that matches the metric name or matches something in the description. Here I type debt and you can see what matches.
You can also use the metric browser to find the metrics you want to chart. This is what the metric browser looks like. There is set of folders, you can search by name, and it has a description of each metric that matches. To chart a fundamental just click on the box.
In either case, when you select a metric, it is added to the shortcut menu for easy future reference.
Stock Rover also has the concept of metric packages, which is a set of metrics which are charted together. This the default set of metric packages we provide, that you can see here. So, for example we can choose Margins to see Boeing’s gross margin, operating margin and net margin over the last ten years.
You can also create your own metrics package. You do this by simply selecting the fundamentals you want. For example, let’s select Price to Book, Price to Earnings and Price to Sales. So, these three things are charted together to create a metrics package we simply click on Save as New Metrics Package and give it a name. Now you see the metric package is added to the metric package list. Here we are creating a package from price to earnings, price to book and price to sales. we can call it PE and friends.
Events
The last thing we will look at are events. So, I’m going to clear the Fundamentals chart to create room. I’m going to clear the Bollinger Bands and I am going to switch to a 2-year chart. There are six types of events Stock Rover can mark on charts. They are earnings announcements, Stock Splits, Dividends, the Maximum Drawdown point, Portfolio Activity and Alerts. Let’s look at each in turn.
For example, with events let’s switch to Comcast.
Let’s start by looking at the Earnings Events. Normally these come every quarter. On Comcast we can see a series of rectangular boxes indicating earnings events. If we mouse over a box, we get the details including the announcement date, the actual EPS, the expected EPS and the % surprise from expected. If we mouse over past events to see Comcast ‘s history we will see that they have a tendency to have small positive earnings surprises every quarter.
Let’s now look at split events. So, we’ll uncheck EPS and we’ll check splits. To pick up a split for Comcast we will have to back further in time. So, we’ll go back to the beginning of 2017. If we look closely, you’ll see a diamond here and that indicates a 2 for 1 split that occurred with Comcast stock on February 21st 2017.
The next event to look at are dividend events. Comcast pays dividends and if we check the dividend event, we’ll see a series of circles that are drawn. If we mouse over a circle, we see the dividend date and the amount of the dividend. The date we show is the ex-dividend date, which is the date when the stock is trading without the value of the next dividend. Or in other words, if you buy on or after the ex-dividend date, you will not get the next dividend. From a chart perspective, it is when the price is adjusted to reflect the future payment of the dividend. The actual payment date is generally several weeks after the ex-dividend date.
So, if you mouse over the dividends, we can see Comcast’s quarterly dividend payments. We can see that they increase the dividends generally once per year as the dividends are unchanged for four quarters and then there’s an increase.
The next event, Max drawdown shows the point of biggest loss in the charted period. The Maximum drawdown is indicated by an upside-down triangle. If we mouseover we can see that the maximum drawdown in the period charted is 28.45% which occurred on May 8th, 2018. If we widen the date range typically the maximum drawdown event will change. However, in the case of Comcast that actually was the worst period in the last 10 years and the maximum drawdown date did not change.
The next event is the Portfolio Activity event. I am going to switch back to a 2-year period and actually change the date to be a three-year period. I am also going to clear some of the other events so we can just focus on portfolio events. When we check portfolio events, we see a triangle pointed upwards. It will show the buys and sells that occurred in any of your portfolios. For example, I first purchased Comcast stock on December 30th 2016. I see that on February 6th 2018 I bought 500 more shares of the stock and then on December 12th 2018 I sold 400 shares of the stock.
The last event are any alerts that I set on Comcast. I set up an alert when the price drops below $38 and that alert fired on February 8th 2019. So, let’s see that. Alerts are designated by a sideways triangle. When I mouse over it, I can see the alert that Comcast fell below $38 on February 8th 2019.
So that is a brief tour of the advanced features of Stock Rover charting. All the examples showed one stock, but everything can be done for multiple stocks. As a last example, let’s do a P/E chart of Google and Facebook. First, we reset the chart. Then we add Google as the primary ticker and Facebook as a comparison ticker. Let’s set the period to 5 years and let’s also select a fundamental chart. Let’s do the P/E multiple. Here we can see Google and Facebook’s price chart together along with their P/E’s charted below. I have shown two comparison tickers but you can have up to 12.
Conclusion
The only advanced feature we did not cover was Ratio Charts. Ratio charts is covered in its own separate video. So, that completes the tour of advanced charting in Stock Rover. Please be sure to check our other videos on charting. Thank you for watching.
