Online Broker Review: Fidelity Charts

Updated Saturday, December 18, 2010

Charts Grade: B

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Note: This is a review for the standard Fidelity charts. For our review of the Fidelity Active Trader Pro charts please click here.

Overview:

Since our initial review in 2008, Fidelity has upgraded to their own charting engine from previously using charts provided by BigCharts.com. The charts now have a clean, attractive appearance but our major gripe is that they are fairly small and cannot be resized. For those of us with large, high resolution monitors this is a major drawback. On the plus side, charts feature all of the standard plot types, time frames and comparison features. There are also a respectable number of technical indicators and drawing tools. Chart settings can be saved and retrieved easily and chart data can even be saved to file. The new Fidelity charts are a big leap forward from the previous offering.

Details:

To start let's take a look at a basic one year mountain chart for Sony (SNE) with colored volume bars shown at the bottom (click on images for larger views):

Chart comparisons can be shown between a large number of stocks and indexes. Here is a two year line chart comparing Sony with three other major consumer electronics companies:

Fidelity's charts contain 3 different event types and 39 technical indicators from which to choose. Below is a three month candlestick chart of Macy's (M) with dividend and earnings events and bollinger bands and MACD technical indicators:

There are 12 different drawing tools to choose from. Here is a five year candlestick chart with trend channels and text notes:

Some chart colors can be customized but the settings are not as customizable as those charts offered by competitors.

To save chart settings, click on the Save Chart button located at the top right corner of the chart. Give your chart a name and then it can be retrieved at any time by clicking on the same button.

Chart data can also be exported to a comma separated value (CSV) file. To do this, click on the Export button located just above the Save Chart button. A file will be generated containing the open, high, low and closing prices along with the volume for each data point specified on the chart.