Viewing Indicator or Overlay Values for Previous Days
Last updated
Last updated
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Members can easily view historical price data for a ticker symbol, but viewing historical values for indicators and overlays is not as simple. There are two ways to view past data values for an overlay or indicator. For these examples, we'll assume we want to determine the 50-day simple moving average value for MSFT on February 1st, 2018.
The best way to view the indicator or overlay value for a date in the past is to use the “Select Start/End” option for the date range, in order to view the chart as it would have looked on 02/01/2018.
Once you've created a chart for MSFT, choose “Select Start/End” from the Range dropdown menu in the Chart Attributes section.
By default, the End Date is set to “(today)”, meaning that the chart will always be updated with today's data. We want to see how the chart looked on February 1st, 2018, so we'll replace the End Date with “2018-02-01”.
Once the chart has been updated, you can see that the date in the top-left corner of the chart is 1-Feb-2018, while the chart legends (shown in the green boxes below) now display the price, indicator and overlay values for that date.
In the above chart, we can see that the 50-day moving average for MSFT was 86.59 on February 1st, 2018.
Using the Date Range is very accurate, but can be time-consuming if you want to determine the values for multiple past days. In that situation, you may want to use the Inspector to quickly determine approximate indicator or overlay values for multiple days.
Once you've created a chart for MSFT that includes the past dates in question, click the “Inspect” checkbox above the chart to turn on the Inspector.
With Inspector turned on, you will see grey crosshairs when you mouse over the chart. Move the crosshairs so that the vertical crosshair lines up with the date in question and the horizontal crosshair lines up with the indicator or overlay value for that day.
A small information box will pop up near the crosshairs that show the highlighted date, volume and OHLC values. At the bottom of the information box is a “Y” value, which shows the approximate position of the crosshairs on the vertical axis.
When you've positioned the crosshairs over the indicator/overlay on the correct date, this Y value is your approximate indicator/overlay value.
