To show the charting app over full screen and get all the functions, we can search for Chart through the search bar (or use the shortcut "CHT" + ENTER) or from the tab Charting -> Chart.
A chart opens that defaults to the S&P 500 Index chart.
If you want to change the financial instrument on the graph or if you want to draw an additional one on the graph, you must first open the tab for inserting commands on the left side of the application.
/This procedure applies to the old version of the program./
/This procedure applies to the new version of the program./
To add a new instrument to the graph, enter the desired instrument in the Add instrument window (e.g. TSLA.O).
A chart with several financial instruments can be made manually by entering the instruments described in the above procedure or by using the search bar.
Enter the desired instruments in the search bar and separate them with commas. After entering all the desired instruments, press the TAB key, then add "CHT", which is the abbreviation for the graphing application, followed by TAB again to confirm the selection. The search engine automatically offers us many options for editing the graph — so we can quickly customize the display right from the search bar.
The preview of the graph on the right adjusts on the fly to the properties entered in the search bar. Of course, by pressing ENTER, the graph can be drawn beforehand and then additional changes can be introduced later with the help of buttons.
In our case, we chose the second option (Time Range), in which we had to additionally specify the period in which we want to have the graph drawn.
To change the displayed time interval, we can use:
The frequency of displayed data points of the time series can be changed above the chart using the marked frame. The daily setting means that for every trading day a single point will be drawn on the chart (the "close price"). If we want to observe a more accurate price movement and use intraday data as well, we will set this interval to a lower value.
In the bar above the chart we have buttons for customizing the graphs in numerous ways. Some options will be presented in the following examples.
We can also change the values that the graph shows us. The categories are as follows:
You can confirm your choice in the tab on the left side of the graph.
Example 1:
Let us change the settings that instead of showing the price of the stocks, the chart shows the returns of the instruments in the selected time frame. This can be done by changing the Absolute price to Total return in the Price series section.
We get the output below:
We would like to compare the returns of the chosen 3 companies with the returns of the S&P500 index. This can be done by selecting Relative performance under Price series. We type the desired benchmark in the base window, in our case that means S&P500 (ticker .SPX) and we get the following chart:
We can observe that in the selected time interval the Tesla stocks performed over 30% worse compared to the S&P500 index, while the stocks of the companies Microsoft and Apple outperformed the index.