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I'm using Yahoo! Finance to compare the FTSE 250 and DAX indices.

However, I'm getting two very different results when comparing the indices over the same date range, depending on which I select as the primary stock to compare against.

Why is this?

(p.s. secondly, does anyone know how to force the time/X axis to be linear? The second chart skews the first 5 years. Sorry - I know that's a separate question!)

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Are you sure you're using the same date range? If you're using Max, then you're not, as ^FTMC goes back to 12/1/1985 while ^GDAXI only goes back to 11/1/1990. If I enter a custom date range of 11/1/1990 through 10/24/2015, I get:

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and:

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which, other than the dates it chose to use as labels on the x-axes, look identical.

(I tried to add the URLs of the charts, but it looks like the Yahoo! URLs don't include the comparison symbol, which makes them useless for this answer. They're easy enough to construct though, just add the secondary symbol using the Comparison button and set the date range using the calendar button.)

On your PS, I don't know, as you can see by my charts it even chose different labels when the date ranges were identical (although at least it didn't scale different dates differently), so maybe it's trying to be "smart" and choose dates based on the total amount of data available for the primary symbol, which is different in the two cases.

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  • Your charts certainly look a lot different to mine! The start dates may have been a week or two out (the UI seemed to do some rounding of dates that made it hard to make the charts consistent). Regardless, the readings for FTMC on Feb 2000 show completely different values across each.
    – Lawrence Wagerfield
    Oct 24, 2015 at 23:09
  • @LawrenceWagerfield Ah, I see, you're looking at the values of the index, the 6451.19 vs the 3036.10. Yes, that's weird. :-) How are you drawing the charts? I played around with basically all the chart options and couldn't get charts that look exactly like yours, mine always have the YAHOO! FINANCE watermark, the - and + for changing the date range, and a different legend.
    – blm
    Oct 25, 2015 at 7:20
  • My charts were from uk.finance.yahoo.com which has an older chart system. Have tried using the much newer charts on finance.yahoo.com and they don't produce the same odd behavior (both agree on a value of 6451 on Feb 2000). Thanks!
    – Lawrence Wagerfield
    Oct 25, 2015 at 10:04
  • Ok, if I go to uk.finance.yahoo.com I see the same thing you do. Interestingly if I use some other primary symbol, I get another value, for example ^DJI gives a value of 6181.02 for ^FTMC on Feb 2000, so I wonder if it's trying to do some currency conversion?
    – blm
    Oct 25, 2015 at 16:52
  • Ahh I hadn't even thought of that. It's a possibility. For now I'm happy to use the US one (it seems more up-to-date). Thanks again for your help!
    – Lawrence Wagerfield
    Oct 26, 2015 at 10:45

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