Percentages on old yahoo charts.?

Question

On the basic charts (not the new ones) on the y axis, it has percentages.. What do those mean?

Thanks

Anthony

Answer 1

I am not quite sure what you are talking about, I am assuming you are speaking about Yahoo stock charts, but the charts themselves do not have percentages on it, those are in the boxes bellow the chart.  The charts are split, the bottom quarter shows the volume and the upper 3/4 show the dollar amount.  If you look up and down the left hand side, you will see in the volume area that it is shown in the millions and above that you see an adjust dollar amount, concentrating on the actual amount is trading at.  So if it is trading at 50ish dollars a share, you will see the lower amounts mutated, if it is trading at 10 dollars a share, you will not see anything above that amount.  As you look off to the right, from the far left, you will see a line marking the path the trades took for the period of time that you defined for it to look at.

Hope that helps.

John B.

Answer 2

AFAIK they ONLY show percentages when you're COMPARING stocks (or indices) over a period. Let's say you're comparing how Apple and Dell did over the last 5 days, or AKAM vs the Nasdaq. The only useful way to compare those is to set the start of the period to 0% (no gain, no loss) and take it from there.

It wouldn't make much sense to compare $1 gain in Dell to $1 in Apple, when they're at totally different levels to begin with.