Click here for more information on Barchart Opinion and Trading Signals.
Legacy Opinions are a different set of 13 indicators that previously were used to form the Barchart Opinion for all asset classes on the website. On July 15, 2019, we released a new set of strategies for all asset classes except futures contracts. Site users may, however, still access these "legacy Opinions" for Stocks, ETFs, Forex, and Funds.
Barchart Opinions show traders what a variety of popular trading systems are suggesting in terms of going long or short the market. The Opinions takes up to 5 years' worth of historical data and runs these prices through thirteen different technical indicators. After each calculation, the program assigns a buy, sell or hold value for each study, depending on where the price lies in reference to the common interpretation of the study. For example, if the price is above the moving average of the security then this is generally considered an upward trend or a buy.
Note: A security needs to have more than 200 active trading days in order to generate an Opinion reading; for futures, the contract must have more than 100 active trading days.
Opinions are updated every 20 minutes throughout the day, using delayed data from the exchanges.
The Overall Average Signal, Strength and Direction is shown at the top of the page. This represents the average of the 13 popular indicators detailed in the table below.
The table groups the 13 indicators based on Short, Medium, and Long Term time frames.
- Indicators in the Short Term group generally are used to interpret price movement that happens over the last 20 days.
- Medium Term indicators interpret price movement that happens over the last 50 days.
- Long Term indicators interpret price movement that happens over the last 100-200 days.
- Trend Seeker® is in its own group and represents a composite look at price movement.
Calculations
The Short, Medium and Long term indicators are grouped together and calculated separately for their groups. The overall indicator is a composite of all 13 studies listed on the page.
- A Buy is assigned 1 point
- A Sell is assigned -1 point
- A Hold is assigned 0 points
The indicator value is determined by adding up the totals for the different groups and dividing this sum by the number of studies in the group. The indicator is expressed in terms of a percentage. If the total is greater than zero, then this is a "Buy". If the total is zero, then this is a "Hold". If the total is less than zero, then this is a "Sell".
To keep the results in a more logical format, we factor the overall opinion by 1.04 to keep the end result in multiples of 8 percentage points, with the exception of a 100% buy or sell. This is why the opinion indicators will be displayed as 8%, 16%, ... 88%, 96% and 100%, for example, rather the exact percentage value.
Support and Resistance
This section shows a snapshot view of the Trader's Cheat Sheet with the Last Price, and six separate pivot points (3 Support Levels, and 3 Resistance Points). The Last Price shown is the last trade price at the time the quote page was displayed, and will not update every 10 seconds (as the Last Price at the top of the Quote page does). The Last Price will update only when the page is refreshed.
Pivot points are used to identify intraday support, resistance and target levels. The pivot point and its support and resistance pairs are defined as follows, where H, L, C are the current day's high, low and close, respectively. Support and Resistance points are based on end-of-day prices and are intended for the current trading session if the market is open, or the next trading session if the market is closed.
- Pivot Point: (PP) = (H + L + C) / 3
- 1st Resistance Level: (R1) = (2 * PP) - L
- 2nd Resistance Level: (R2) = PP + (R1 - S1)
- 3rd Resistance Level: (R3) = H + (2 * (PP - L))
- 1st Support Level: (S1) = (2 * PP) - H
- 2nd Support Level: (S2) = PP - (R1 - S1)
- 3rd Support Level: (S3) = L - (2 * (H - PP))
