AGG - One of these is not like the other...

[JTH]

FYI

For a long time now I have noticed a difference in AGG when you compare freestockcharts.com vs. stockcharts.com

Here's an example, look at the two 6 month charts of AGG side by side, can you see the difference? One chart appears to be in a downtrend while the other appears to be in an uptrend! The 22 Sep high is not the same, I don't know why, but it isn't. On 22 Sep the High on freestockcharts.com is 111.03 (as is on Google finance) but the high on stockcharts.com is 109.91

Point being, if you've been using the wrong website you might be mislead as to the true direction of AGG.

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[RealMoneyIssues]

I have heard that stockcharts.com has bad numbers...

A great point and thanks for bringing it up here to let folks know :D

[nasa1974]

I use Yahoo stocks.

[SPN46er]

I did a little poking around and some experimentation and this is what I found (I may or may not be correct this is just my theory).

I found this link for a stockcharts.com support FAQ about complaints of an incorrectly reported high on the QQQQ chart. There is a response from the stockcharts.com technical team that follows.

http://stockcharts.com/school/doku.php?id=support:mailbag:why_is_last_tuesday

Apparently stockcharts.com goes back and edits the price after market close after corrections have been made due to audits of that day's trades.

I have also found that both stockcharts.com and finviz.com show a similar chart for AGG (showing an uptrend) whereas freestockcharts.com and even the iShares website show a slight downward trend. The latter 2 sites also report a intraday high of 111.03 on Sep. 22, 2011 compared the the intraday high of 109.91 reported by the other 2 charting sites.

So I decided to see which of the prices our F fund tracked.

Taking the historical share prices back to Sep. 1, 2011 and charting them in Excel you can see that the F fund seems to be tracking the prices shown on stockcharts.com and finviz.com. On Sep. 22nd the share price was set at 15.3158 which was a local high and would correspond with the AGG closing price as reported by stockcharts.com as 109.68. The F fund then continued downwards thereafter until again reaching the price level of 15.3178 on Dec. 14, 2011 where the reported closing price of AGG was 109.88. Ultimately the F fund maxed out at 15.4226 on Jan. 17, 2012 which corresponded to a close of 110.58 according to stockcharts.com.

My question is wouldn't the F fund have been priced roughly around the 15.47-15.52 level if the closing price of AGG was 110.80 as reported by freestockcharts.com and the iShares site on Sep. 22nd. This is definitely an interesting flaw you have discovered. I guess we sometimes take for granted the accuracy of the information we get so readily from financial websites nowadays.

[SPN46er]

One other thing, if you look at the stockcharts.com chart you can see that the 109.91 high of Sep 22nd seems to be acting as a support level for the current price performance. It previously acted as a slight resistance back in December and then as support for the early 2012 bounce. The 2 bounces off the 110.80 level look like a double top formation which broke to the downside.

[JTH]

Great post SPN46er, I'm hoping Tom will chime in with some unknown words of wisdom on this matter...

[tsptalk]

I'm not sure what to think. I use Decisionpoint.com and they actually use the program from stockcharts so they match them.