Clever Point and Figure Charts for iOS
by CI Staff
$4.99
Create unique point & figure charts on your iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.
Point & figure charts are a favorite of ours here at CI and we use them extensively in our own stock analysis. These charts attempt to capture the struggle between supply and demand. At the same time, they are able to filter out market “noise”—short-term price fluctuations that take place during longer, more established trends. Point & figure charts do this by focusing only on “significant” price movements. To learn more about point & figure charting, see this Technically Speaking column from the Computerized Investing archives.
One frustration of using point & figure charts is that there are few online services that provide them. One is StockCharts.com, a CI Editor’s Top Pick among technical analysis and charting websites. Recently, we ran across an app from Cleverinfo—Clever Point and Figure Charts—that brings these useful charts to your iPod touch, iPhone or iPad.
This app costs $4.99. Many of the apps we highlight here are free, but given the unique and useful nature of point & figure charts, we feel that the fee is justified. Furthermore, this is a one-time fee with no associated recurring costs.
After paying for the app at the Apple App Store and installing it on your iOS device, you begin by setting up a watchlist of stocks. As you enter in the tickers and add them to your watchlist, the tickers appear as a heat map—a visual representation of your stocks, color-coded based on their price performance during the latest trading day. This is a quick way to get a feel for how the stocks are performing.
Tapping on a ticker in the heat map gives you the option of removing it from the watchlist, refreshing prices or opening a point & figure (PnF) chart. When you select the PnF Chart, you have a number of customization features at your disposal, including number of boxes for reversal, box scaling, box size and date range. If any of these terms are unfamiliar to you, the app also provides a help system that gives you a background of point & figure charts as well as how to make use of the app’s charts. The charts themselves are scaled to fit your screen, so all of the data appears without having to swipe or pinch the image. The charts are in black and white, however; it would be better if the user had the option of adjusting the color scheme of the charts.
You also have the option of manually adding upward and downward trendlines as well as horizontal lines to signify areas of support and resistance. Another nice feature would be if trendlines were automatically drawn for you.
Overall, we really like the Clever Point and Figure Charts app. It is very easy to set up and use and it’s nice to have these very useful charts at our fingertips when using an iPad and iPhone. If you are a fan of point & figure charts, this is a must-have app.
Clever Point and Figure Charts for iOS
$4.99