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The stock charts in Empire Avenue can be tricky to understand. Some people don’t even know where they are. (Click on the blue My Profile Tab and then the amber My Graphs tab.)  Once there you will see three graphs showing your share price for the last 24 hours, the last 7 days and the last three months.  I am going to focus on the 24 hour chart.  I am by no means an expert on this.  This is only what I have been able to deduce, but it might help you.

The first thing to notice are the scales.  The vertical scale shows stock price and the horizontal scale shows time.  Be careful when comparing two people’s charts. The graph always adjusts to the movement of the stock and the scales between two charts can be quite different.  A stock that only moves up and down a cents can look the same as one that moves up and down dollars.  You have to look at the price scale to figure out how big the movements are.  On this 24-hour graph the time scale will change throughout the day.  Your morning moves will look quite different as the day progresses.

Let me make a quick comment on the time.  It appears that time listed is 4 hours later in the day (ahead) of the Eastern time zone (Toronto/New York).  I am not sure why as Universal Time or Greenwich Mean Time which is used for international timekeeping is five hours off of Eastern time.  I thought maybe there was a one hour delay in results, but new trades show almost right away.  Ah well - still works.

Let’s look at the trades on the chart.  This is my chart from about 11:30 am June 15.  

• (A) is the opening share price. More accurately, it is the closing share price from the day before which for me was 23.58.  That number immediately changes to reflect, either up or down, your activity on the site from that closing day.  I was busy on the 14th.
• So, I took a bump up to about 24.4.  A number that I can see in the first trade of my stock this day (B).
• At this point, I had a fairly strong buy of 100 shares (Thanks LOA!).  My stock took a nice little jump, but then someone sold me (C) and oops out of order (E).  
• Too bad for them because then the stock started rising again.  (D) was a nice purchase of 60 shares, but it is important to note that the rise can look fairly gradual because the next purchase didn’t come until about an hour and twenty minutes later.
• Then, got two smaller buys fairly close together (F) & (G).  I think you get the idea.  
• (H) and (I) weren’t that different in size, they just had different times until the next trade.  
• However, (K) was a big buy.

So, when you understand charts, you can not only see if potential investments are going up or down, you can very quickly see how many people are trading, how often, how many up, how many down and how big the trades are.

Another word of caution reminding you about my not being an expert on this.   When there is a lot of trading, I don’t think the charts show every data point. There could also be other variables.  It’s also possible my interpretation is not 100%.  That said, I put some of this together by watching my actual trades today, and my analysis here seems to match what happened today.

UPDATE:

Here’s an interesting chart I saw today:

Pretty big jump right.  How big do you think the buy was?  Answer: Not very - the stock only moved about ten cents.  ;-)

Happy Empire Building.