The Charles Schwab is a savings and loan holding company. Through its subsidiaries, Co. engages in wealth management, securities brokerage, banking, asset management, custody, and financial advisory services. Co.'s two segments are: Investor Services, which provides retail brokerage, investment advisory, and banking and trust services to individual investors, and retirement plan services, as well as other corporate brokerage services to businesses; and Advisor Services, which provides custodial, trading, banking and trust, and support services, as well as retirement business services, to independent registered investment advisors, independent retirement advisors, and recordkeepers.
When researching a stock like Charles Schwab, many investors are the most familiar with Fundamental Analysis — looking at a company's balance sheet, earnings, revenues, and what's happening in that company's underlying business. Investors who use Fundamental Analysis to identify good stocks to buy or sell can also benefit from SCHW Technical Analysis to help find a good entry or exit point. Technical Analysis is blind to the fundamentals and looks only at the trading data for SCHW stock — the real life supply and demand for the stock over time — and examines that data in different ways. One of these ways is called the Relative Strength Index, or RSI. This popular indicator, originally developed in the 1970's by J. Welles Wilder, looks at a 14-day moving average of a stock's gains on its up days, versus its losses on its down days. The resulting SCHW RSI is a value that measures momentum, oscillating between "oversold" and "overbought" on a scale of zero to 100. A reading below 30 is viewed to be oversold, which a bullish investor could look to as a sign that the selling is in the process of exhausting itself, and look for entry point opportunities. A reading above 70 is viewed to be overbought, which could indicate that a rally in progress is starting to get crowded with buyers. If the rally has been a long one, that could be a sign that a pullback is overdue. |