Consolidated Data for Canadian Stocks Coming on August 1st

In case you did not know, over the past 5 years, the Canadian stock market has undergone a bit of a revolution.  Several alternate exchanges - most prominently the "Alpha" exchange - have sprung up and managed to capture a significant portion of the trading volume for many Canadian stocks - over 1/3rd of total volume in many cases.

This has put technicians in a bit of a bind when it comes to analyzing data for Canadian stocks.  The volume data that comes directly from the Toronto exchange has been decreasing (or increasing more slowly) as these new exchanges siphoned off more and more trades.  At what point does a chartist try to account for that "lost" volume and, maybe more importantly, how important is having a continuous history of consistantly reported volume?

With those questions serving as a backdrop, I am pleased to announce that StockCharts.com is now able to receive so-called "Consolidated" Canadian volume data - i.e., volume data that includes both TSX trades and Alpha trades.  We plan on switching over from our current TSX-only charts to Consolidated volume charts on August 1st.

While this change will not have a significant effect on price data, it will cause the volume bars for many Canadian stocks to jump up noticably.  Because of that, after this change goes into effect, volume-based indicators will probably give misleading readings as they adjust to the increased volume values.  These issues will primarily effect daily and weekly charts.

We spent a lot of time researching other options for minimizing the impact of this change on our charts but unfortunately we were unable to come up with a better workable solution.  Our apologies for any inconvenience that this change will cause in the near term.  In the long run, I think all Canadian investors will agree that Consolidated volume data is an important improvement to our charting capabilities.  Hopefully it will result in even better chart analysis and more profitable trades down the road.

As always, I'm interested in everyone's opinions on this change.  Feel free to leave yours in the "Comments" section below.

- Chip