What to use instead of BigCharts

The product

BigCharts was MarketWatch's free charting site, a chart of a US stock on screen without signing up for anything. Its about page, captured by the Internet Archive on 3 August 2025, described interactive charts, quotes, industry analysis, intraday stock screeners and market commentary, and called the whole thing "a free service supported entirely by our site sponsors". The footer named FactSet as the source of both its intraday and end-of-day data, with real-time last-sale prices for US stocks reported through Nasdaq only and other intraday data delayed at least 15 minutes.

Four things kept people coming back, and the site's own pages describe each of them. Its features page, still online in a February 2025 capture, is old text (it lists screen sizes of 640x480 and 1024x768), so read it as what BigCharts was built to do rather than a 2025 spec sheet.

• Quick and interactive charts. A quick chart was a symbol and a click. The interactive one took up to ten comparison symbols on one chart, moving averages, 25 indicator studies and up to three lower indicator panes, in seven chart styles.
• Historical Quotes. The page itself, captured on 29 March 2025, still said what it did: "This Historical Quotes tool allows you to look up a security's exact closing price." Type a symbol and a date and it returned the split-adjusted close with the open, high, low and volume, the split adjustment factor, and a two-month chart marking the day, back to January 1985.
• My Favorite Charts. Up to twenty saved charts, each remembering its symbol, time frame, comparisons, indicators and style. The help pages' Favorite Charts FAQ, captured in February 2025, explains that the list lived in a browser cookie, and that people who cleared their cookies lost it.
• Industry and market pages. The ten best and worst industries over a chosen period, tiled thumbnail charts of every stock in an industry, and market diaries of advancing and declining issues and new highs and lows.

What happened. By 25 July 2025 every page carried a banner, absent from a capture on 23 July: "To our valued customers: As of August 21, 2025, BigCharts.com will redirect to MarketWatch.com, where you still have access to the best charts, market data, and continued support. Thank you for being a part of our community." It gave no reason. The Internet Archive recorded the home page still answering early on 21 August 2025, and by 24 August it returned a permanent redirect to MarketWatch's home page. On 27 October 2026 the old addresses all land on www.marketwatch.com, but not all of them on a page: Historical Quotes redirects to a market-data page, or with a symbol in the address to that symbol's download-data page; the industry section to an industries page; the favourites view and edit pages to a watchlist page. The quick-chart and interactive-chart addresses, which are what most bookmarks hold, and the favourites list page are passed through unchanged to the same path on MarketWatch, where nothing is served.

What to use instead

Nothing in this catalogue replaces BigCharts as a whole, and nothing is free in the same no-strings way. Split it into the jobs it did. Prices and limits below were read on the vendors' own pages on 27 October 2026 unless a date says otherwise.

A chart, now. StockCharts is the nearest relative: a technical-analysis website since 1999, with a free level of three indicators on a 900-pixel chart and nothing saved. Its PerfCharts compare up to 12 symbols on one chart, by its own help pages, against BigCharts' ten. TradingView is the more modern chart. Its free Basic plan, which needs a sign-up but no card, allows one chart per tab, two indicators per chart, fewer than BigCharts gave away, three price alerts and 5,000 bars of history.

The favourites list. This is the job that now costs money. StockCharts' ChartLists are folders of saved charts, and they need a membership: Basic, at 19.95 dollars a month, holds one list of up to 1,000 charts, and Extra, at 29.95, holds 250 lists. TradingView Basic saves one chart layout and a watchlist of up to 30 symbols, which is a list of tickers rather than a list of charts with their settings.

The closing price on a date. Stock Analysis prints a daily table of open, high, low, close, adjusted close and volume for each stock, without an account. The free ranges run to five years; ten years and full history are locked to Pro, at 79 dollars a year. There is no date box, so you pick a range and page back to the day. For anything older, Stooq publishes each symbol's daily history as a CSV, Apple's from September 1984, free for personal use only. Its pages sit behind a bot check, and the card's check of 4 October 2026, which found browser downloads working, is the latest this page can stand behind: the site returned nothing readable to a scripted request on 27 October. For a whole market's closes on one date rather than one stock's, see end-of-day prices in bulk.

Industry and market pages. The free Finviz site, covered on the Finviz Elite card, has a group screener that ranks sectors, industries, countries and size bands by performance over a week, a month, a quarter, half a year, a year or the year to date, served without a login, plus a market map. Quotes on the free site are delayed one minute. It covers US listings only, and the rest of the charting platforms and screeners category has the paid alternatives.

MarketWatch itself is where the redirect sends you, and it has charts and quote pages of its own. It has no card in this catalogue, and it refused a scripted request on 27 October 2026, so this page does not describe what it offers.

What you give up

No account, ever. BigCharts asked for nothing, not even an email address, and remembered your settings in a cookie. Stock Analysis, the Finviz group pages and StockCharts' free charts still ask for nothing, but anything you want kept now needs a login at TradingView or a paid membership at StockCharts.

One box for a past close. BigCharts took a symbol and a date and answered in one step, with the split factor printed beside the price, back to 1985. Stock Analysis answers inside five years by paging through a table; Stooq answers further back, but as a file you download and search yourself. Neither prints the split factor next to the close, so that is now a separate lookup.

Twenty saved charts for nothing. A favourites list that kept each chart's indicators, comparisons and style cost nothing on BigCharts. The nearest equivalent, a StockCharts ChartList, starts at 19.95 dollars a month, and the free alternative is TradingView's single saved layout.

Migration notes

The favourites list is not coming back, but your bookmarks remember it. The list was a cookie on BigCharts' own address, and the watchlist page that address now redirects to does not read it. What survives is any chart you bookmarked: BigCharts kept a chart's settings in its address, with symb= for the symbol and further parameters for the comparison index, moving averages and style. The links now end on a MarketWatch address that serves nothing, but the symbols in them are still readable, which is enough to rebuild a list.

A close you copied from BigCharts was split-adjusted. It was adjusted for every split up to the day you looked it up, so it will not match the price on a trade confirmation from before a split, and it will not match a table today if the stock has split since. Stock Analysis prints a close and an adjusted close side by side; Stooq does not document how it adjusts, so check one known split before trusting a series. Split and dividend history as data covers where to get the factors.

The numbers come from someone else now. BigCharts' prices were FactSet's. Each replacement licenses its own, so a close can differ from a figure you noted years ago for reasons that have nothing to do with the stock. When two sources disagree, the listing exchange's official close is the figure to settle on.