Adjusting Chart Line Types

Yahoo! Finance Charts are fully customizable, and depending on the information you would like to analyze in your trading, you can change the chart settings to reflect your investing preferences.

Under the CHART SETTINGS button, you have three customizable choices you can choose from. The first option you can control is the LINE TYPE of the chart you are analyzing. The default setting for your Yahoo! Finance Charts is a LINE chart, but you have two other choices if you prefer: OHLC and CANDLESTICK.

To change your settings, place your cursor above the CHART SETTINGS button. Once the menu appears, move your cursor down to the LINE TYPE, and hover above it until another menu appears. On this menu, the setting you currently have selected will have a check mark next to it. To change your setting, you simply have to click on the setting you want to enable. This will move the check mark and change your chart.

LINE charts are the simplest of the three types of charts. LINE charts form as the chart connects the close price of each period to the close price of the previous time period and the close price of the following time period with a straight line. Some investors prefer the simplicity of line charts, while others prefer the additional information they receive from OHLC and CANDLESTICK charts.

OHLC stands for open, high, low and close. An OHLC chart, also known as a bar chart, shows a vertical bar for each time period with two horizontal hash marks indicating where the open and close prices for the stock were on that day.

CANDLESTICK charts are similar to OHLC charts except that the area between the open and close prices is filled in on each candlestick, or bar. Many investors prefer looking at CANDLESTICK charts because they are usually easier to read.

Now that you're finished reading the text version of this tutorial, watch the video.

Next tutorial: Adjusting Chart Scales

Back to the Yahoo! Finance Charts User Guide Index