Online Broker Review

Updated Sunday, January 10, 2010

Charts Grade: C

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Overview:

The OptionsHouse charts are average as far as visual appearances go. This could be greatly improved if chart colors could be customized since the default colors often clash. Charts can be displayed at any desired size which is quite nice. There are a decent selection of technical and fundamental indicators to choose from but not nearly as many as those offered by the best charting applications. Very basic drawing tools are provided but they are rather limited. Saving chart settings does not appear to be working at this time. Overall, OptionsHouse charts are certainly respectable but are missing a few key features to make them competitive with the top charting applications.

Details:

Basic one year line chart for Research in Motion (RIMM) (click on images for larger views):

Five year line chart comparing RIMM, AAPL, HPQ and GOOG:

Three year candlestick chart for Exxon Mobile (XOM) with 52-week moving average, dividend events and MACD as a lower indicator:

Users can draw lines and add notes to charts. Here is a six month candlestick chart for XOM with two trend lines and some notes we added to signal when the downtrend was broken and then when the uptrend was broken:

There is a button on the bottom right corner of the charts screen named Save Chart Settings. Clicking on this prompts the user with a message noting that chart settings have been saved. We spent some time trying to figure out how to load these saved settings but we were unsuccessful. There feature does not seem to be working at this time.

Some brokers allow for the customization of chart colors. For example, users can often modify the background color, the color of the candlesticks, the technical indicator lines and more. OptionsHouse does not allow for any customization of chart colors.

The default size of charts is quite small. Fortunately, charts can be resized simply by dragging the window to a larger size or maximizing the window via the standard windows buttons. One annoyance we found is that requesting a new symbol in the charts application causes the chart size to revert to the default.

OptionsHouse Charts