The Percent Bar
CQG offers fourteen charting styles including a yield chart for fixed income instruments. Here, we will look at Percent Bar charts, a quick and easy way to compare percentage performance of different instruments.
Percent Bar charts display on a percentage basis the current value from one of three user-selected formulas for the starting point: Date, Price and Index.
The trader can select a specific date for the calculation, for example the last day of the previous year to calculate the current return for the year.
For price, the current percentage gain or loss relative to a specific price is displayed.
The index choice is a specific number of days back from the current bar, for example, using 20 creates the current 20-day percentage gain.
The four ETFs displayed in the chart are the streetTRACKS Gold Trust (Symbol: GLD), the Diamonds Trust, Series 1 (Symbol: DIA), the SPDRs, Standard & Poor’s Depositary Receipts (Symbol: SPY), and the NASDAQ-100 Trust, Series 1 (Symbol: QQQQ). The last trading day of 2005 is the date used to calculate the percentage returns.
It has been an interesting year to date. First, GLD edged above a 40 percent return for the year at one point, then fell to a return of just under 7 percent, and is currently up 23.11 percent. At the other extreme, the tech heavy QQQQs were down more than 12 percent at one point, and are now up 10.492 percent. The Diamonds are up 14.708 percent for the year, edging out the SPDRs, which are up just 12.722 percent for the year.
While the return in GOLD has been high, so has been the volatility.
Percent Bar charts are an easy way track the performance of a portfolio of equities or other markets. For example, if you have a self-directed retirement portfolio you could design a page in CQG holding the individual Percent Bar charts of each investment for easy monitoring.
For anyone not familiar with these ETFs, here is a short write-up of each:
The streetTRACKS Gold Trust is an investment that seeks to have the shares reflect the performance of the price of gold bullion less the cost of the Trust’s operations.
The Diamonds Trust, Series 1 (the Trust) seeks to generally match the total return of the Dow Jones Industrial Average minus the expense of the Trust’s operations.
The SPDRs, Standard & Poor’s Depositary Receipts, investment objective is to generally match the price and yield of the S&P 500 Index after the cost of the Trust’s operations.
The NASDAQ-100 Trust, Series 1 holds all of the component securities of the NASDAQ-100 Index. The investment objective of the Trust is to provide investment returns that generally correspond to the total return of the Index minus the cost of the Trust’s operations.
(Source: Google Finance)