How to Read a Price Chart

An unadjusted price is the price the exchange recorded that day, exactly as it stood. An adjusted price rescales past prices with a coefficient taken from the base price the exchange published when a corporate action such as a stock split or a reverse split took place, so the prices before and after the split run as one continuous line. Adjusted prices are the right choice for looking at a long stretch of history, and unadjusted prices are the right choice for seeing the price that actually changed hands that day.

Adjusted prices do not reflect cash dividends. The drop on an ex-dividend date stays where it is, and the risk measures on this page never use adjusted prices.

A candle shows the open, the high, the low and the close inside one bar all at once. It is what to use for reading how much the price swung within the day and how long the upper and lower shadows ran. A line joins the closes only, which makes the shape of a long stretch easy to take in at a glance. The two draw the same record in different ways, and neither changes the values.

They differ in how much time one bar holds. A daily bar packs one day into a single bar, a weekly bar one week and a monthly bar one month, each with its own open, high, low and close. The coarser the grouping, the more the small ripples disappear and the more only the larger shape remains, so recent weeks read more easily on daily bars while several years read more easily on weekly or monthly bars.

The open and the close of a weekly or monthly bar are the open of the first trading day and the close of the last trading day in that stretch, and the high and the low are the highest and lowest points inside it.

The large figure beside the name is the close of the last settled trading day, and the change below it is the difference from the previous close together with its percentage. Prices from the current session are not reflected, and the figure updates once the exchange has published that day's values.