If one wants to know about what stock market charts are all about and their functioning, then this article is relevant. Stock Market Charts are a series of the prices of stocks plotted over a particular time period. The Stock Market Charts generally highlight the fluctuations in the prices of stocks through the working hours of a day as well as over a longer period in the Stock Market.
On the Stock Market Charts, the price scales are plotted along the y-axis which is vertical whereas the horizontal x-axis represents the corresponding time scales from left to right.
Stock Market Charts prove beneficial for the technical analysts and chartists to study an extensive range of securities (stocks, bonds, commodities, futures or market indices) and forecast future price movements. Stock Market Charts are beneficial to everybody associated with the Stock Market as these provide an easily graspable graphical representation of the prices of specific securities over a given time period.
Stock Market Charts can be classified into four main types according to their methods of construction:
Line Chart - concentrates only on the closing price thereby disregarding intra day fluctuations.
Bar Chart - only the high, low and closing prices are plotted on these most popular Stock Market Charts, the high and low are represented through the top and bottom of a vertical bar, the closing is shown as a short horizontal line drawn across that bar.
Candlestick Chart - the two parallel lines on the horizontal plane of a rectangle represent the opening and closing prices on these Stock Market Charts, two vertical lines - one drawn above the rectangle represents the high and the other drawn below it signifies the low, clear blocks signify closings higher than openings whereas solid blocks represent lower closings in comparison to openings.
Point & Figure Chart - concentrates only upon price fluctuations not considering the time taken for those fluctuations to occur.
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