Fractal Stock Grapher

Fractal Stock Grapher is a desktop app that plots the Fractal Dimension Index for stocks (click image to enlarge):

Download the Windows installer: Fractal-Setup.exe

Download Mac OS X installer: Fractal.dmg

Update: In May of 2017, Yahoo Finance shut down its free stock-data API. So, Fractal Stock Grapher can no longer fetch data from Yahoo directly. However, you can still use the app by loading data manually. See the instructions below.

Fractal Stock Grapher uses the Google Chart API to make its charts. So, you need to be connected to the internet while using it. If you are behind an office firewall, you may need to tell the firewall software to permit Fractal Stock Grapher to access trivisonno.com and google.com.

Instructions:
After installing, enter a symbol and click the “Graph” button. If the symbol is in Yahoo’s database, the charts will appear in a couple of seconds.

To look at two charts side-by-side, go onto the “File” menu, and then to “Make New Grapher Window.” You can have as many windows open as you need.

You can also chart intra-day data if you have someplace to download it from. To do that:

Go onto the “File” menu, and then to “Open Data File” and select a file containing the data. The program expects two columns of data, Date and Price, separated by a tab. We have some samples you can download here: Fractal-Data.zip. The file can be of any size, though only the last 100 data points will be graphed. You can use any kind of data: hourly, daily, weekly, monthly. The program will graph whatever you give it.

Use the “Save Data” command on the “File” menu to save a new file with a third column containing the Fractal Dimension Index. The first 30 data points will not have an FDI, but the rest will, no matter how many you have. You can then open this new file in a program like Excel to make larger charts than the Fractal Stock Grapher can make.

Some trading programs allow you to download data. I know that TradeStation and E*Trade do, but as far as I can tell, ThinkOrSwim does not. Wherever you get your data from, all that you need to do is re-format it into a simple two-column, tab-delimited file, and it should work.

If you want to download data from Yahoo yourself, follow these steps:

  1. Go to: http://finance.yahoo.com/
  2. Enter a symbol such as SPY
  3. Click the “Get Quotes” button
  4. Click the “Historical Prices” link
  5. Enter your date range
  6. Click the “Get Prices” button
  7. Scroll down and click the “Download to Spreadsheet” link
  8. Save the file to your desktop
  9. Open the file with Excel
  10. Delete all of the columns except for “Date” and “Close”
  11. Delete the first row that contains the column headers
  12. Use Excel’s sort feature to sort the data into ascending order by date
  13. Go to “Save As – Other Formats”
  14. Chose “Text (tab delimited)” for the “Save as type”
  15. Name the file using the symbol. Example: SPY.txt
  16. Save the new file and then open it with Fractal Stock Grapher

For a cornucopia of trading techniques, see my book: The General Theory of Day-Trading.