Free stock software downloads and resources

There are many ways you can come up with a measure of how far apart stocks are. Here we've come up with a measure of stock distance that has the following properties:

• If two stocks go up and down by the same percentages then their distance is zero.
• If two stocks go up and down in a completely uncorrelated way, then their distance is 1.
• The comparison is made on how the ups and downs of a stock track each other from day to day.

There are many other measure you could come up with, there isn't a unique way of doing it, but it has the kind of behavior that you'd want.

example

You can try this out using the free stock market comparator software on this site. Here is a screen-shot from it.

Here we're looking at stocks close to Kimco Realty Corporation. Looking in the upper right hand corner, you see a red circle with a black ball inside. This is Kimco. Stocks close to it are shown as balls with different colors connected together to form a tree. The stock price for Kimco versus time for a year is shown by the black curve on the lower right hand side.

On the lower left hand table, you see Kimco as the first stock listed. The other lines in the table show stocks close to it.

If you now look at the red ball inside the red circle, this represents the stock price of Boston Properties. Its stock price is shown by the red line in the lower right hand corner. It's listed in the lower left hand table as the entry below Kimco. Its distance from Kimco is 0.167, which is quite small. You can see that the price movements of the two stocks appear quite correlated. Finally shown by the yellow ball in the red circle is AvalonBay Comminuties Inc. It's stock price versus time is shown in yellow, and from the lower right hand table, you can see that it's distance from Kimco is 0.192.

It's hardly surprising that all these stocks tend to track each other because they're in similar businesses. By looking at the distances using this tool you can explore the general trends that you expect to see for correlations of stocks in different categories. Stocks of a feather tend to flock together. You can visually see how to measure stock distance.

How to use the Software

If you want to look at a particular stock, just type in either the symbol or
the company name into the appropriate boxes in the upper left hand corner of the application. It'll automatically search for matching stocks as you type. The data is for stocks in the S&P 500. When you found the one you're looking for in one of the rows, just click on the row and it'll take you to that stock. You can turn on graphs of other stocks by clicking on the "Graph" check box. Then you'll see the graph of that stock appear as well.

If you double click on a row in the table on the lower left hand side, you'll be taken to that stock. You can turn on graphing of neighboring stocks as described above.

If you mouse over the 3D tree, it'll appear as a highlight of the same stock in the lower left hand table. If you click on one of the balls on the 3D tree, it'll take you to that stock also.

Download the software to check the measure of stock distance between stocks in the S&P500.