Expert: Steve Hach - 11/6/2007

Question
Why are long term performance charts (5 years plus) totally inaccurate in yaohho and google charts?  XOM, for example, has often split in the 60 to 90 dollar range.  The five, ten and twenty year charts don't show the share price ever reaching that point until early this decade.  I know share prices were above 60 in the eighties.  I also understand the more data you look at the more it has to be filtered but the long term charts still don't reflect an accurate history overall.  Where can I find more accurate long term charts?

Answer
Hi Zeb,

the short answer to your question is that in order to maintain a more accurate long-term picture the charts do not reflect stock splits because this would wreak havoc with the data and the trend line that shows how the investment would perform over time.

What if you are looking at a long-term chart and one day you see the stock at 60 and the next it is at 30 or 20?  How do you know this is a split and not a drop in share price due to something the market did?

In my mind, I think of it like looking at an economic trend in inflation adjusted dollars, this tends to give you a more accurate idea of what is really going on.

Handling stock splits is always a pain when it comes to tracking stock trends.  At my firm we always panic when we see a stock suddenly lose half its value in one of our portfolio tracking charts until--hopefully--we find out that there was a split.

Unfortunately, sometimes this is NOT the case, as we recently found out with SWHC.

To get up-to-date stock split info you often can go to the company's website and look for their "investor relations" section.  We recently did this with Pepsi Co. and found a complete history of stock splits for a client.

Of course, Yahoo finance includes the split info with the long-term charts right at the bottom, so you have the info right there and know something happened including the ratio of the split.

Major stock tracking software often requires that you get this info on your own and then manually enter it into the software if you want the really accurate charting/historic data.

And of course, when all else fails, make your own charts!

yahoo offers all of the required data for free right on its web site.  All you have to do is download the historic price info from the web into excel--a feature that is also included for free-- and make your own chart with excel.  This chart would have all of the actual price data as well as the adjusted close.

This method would provide the more accurate chart you need.

Best,

Steve