Stock Chart Challenge

Most online stock charts are modeled after their printed brethren. This falls short of what is possible with computers by far, I'm sure.

Here's my challenge: What's the most mind-boggling version of something as mundane as a stock chart you can imagine? How should it use colors, shadows, maybe even 3d if it makes sense? What additional information should it include? How should you be able to interact with it, manipulate it, what animations should be available?

What *sounds* would different stock charts make?! (cf. DataMusic)

Have a look at the following JavaVoxelApplet, showing a fly-by over a mountain-landscape, that waits to be expanded to a DataMusicApplet. -- FridemarPache

Years ago (early 90s) there was a lot of talk of immersive reality, and one of the examples that kept coming up (a LOT - anyone know the origin?) was the example of viewing stock as a cornfield. Related stocks (stalks - get it?) would grow near to each other, so you could see a sector stand out as it grows taller. See WilliamGibson's books for similar musings.

Hmm, in a conventional stock chart, you can see different times "next to each other", because time is converted to space; in a moving corn field, you can't, so I'm not sure this would work very well.

It's a long-standing myth that you can tell anything about a stock by looking at the shape of its chart. It won't matter how you shade it -- you still won't know whether to buy or sell by the shape of the chart.

You could focus on the deltas. If you care about price over time, then push the slow changing stocks into the background. Bring the fast changing stocks forward. You could use color to show if the change is positive or negative. Maybe height to represent volume. It would be nice to be able to reach in and grab a stock to place on your desktop so you can keep an eye on it.

Without the nice metaphor, this last idea is called a watchlist.

I think it would depend on what sort of task you were engaged in, an analyst for a stable growth fund is going to be looking for buy and hold opportunities, the fabled "undervalued with strong fundamentals". Joe Daytrader will be looking at trading activity and trying to sell just before the elevator stops going up. Mostly though any trader is going to be looking for gaps between rational expectations and current or expected market value, there are very few ways to accurately portray this and any point at which you can automagically detect that gap, you can dispense with the trader and let the program execute the trade on its own. In other words a self-obsolescing problem.

I read in TheVisualDisplayOfQuantitativeInformation something like: The chart is not there to interpret the numbers (stocks) for you; it's there to help you decide which numbers (stocks) to look at.

Lots of people are thinking about immersive 3D environments for visualizing stocks, and other data. (A scene from one of the later HitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy books comes to mind; their accounting department does this. ;-)

I was working with a broker a few years ago and when he gave me the description of how to produce a number of the graphs, I suggested that we make the various "magic number" parameters accessible to the user, so that advanced users could change them and run "what if" scenarios. He was aghast!!! "These are the numbers that have always been used - the methodology with proven results. You can't change any of them!!!" (That's what convinced me it's all just voodoo: Most of 'em don't really know what they're talking about.)

At my old company, I was actually working with MicroSoft's ChromeEffects? technology when it was in its alpha/beta stages. Unfortunately, the technology was too far ahead of its time (hardware just wasn't up to snuff) and was put on the backburner apparently.

Anyway, I wrote a couple different demos charting things like the Dow and individual's portfolios that were demo'd at Win98 launch and some other Intel conferences. I'm trying to find a screenshot, I'll post it if I find one.

-- DrewMarsh

http://www.3dstockcharts.com/ shows Island ECN's order book. X=price, Y=shares at the price, Z=time. It would probably be more interesting if the market were open.

Be forewarned that the address above tries to prevent you from backing out to return to this page. I had to hit the "Back" arrow about 10 times to finally escape.

I tend to spawn new windows, so I didn't notice that misbehavior. A workaround seems to be to pull down the recent history list (Netscape calls it 'Go') and back up past the offending page.

I think www.3dstockcharts.com is still a bit disappointing. The only interaction possible seems to be turning the chart around, which is not really necessary to see the data. Plus, it simply doesn't look very nice.

I wrote a program showing a 2D/3D map visualizing the IPOs of the last months. Here, detail information (current stocks, on the right part of the wall) is given more space than context information (past stocks, left parts of the wall). These different levels of compression in y-direction are (hopefully) communicated by the use of perspective. It worked well, alas, our customer is now out of business. If it goes online somewhere again, I'll post a note here.

The idea of the perspective wall is not by me, but was developed by the Xerox PARC User Interface Research people. -- FalkBruegmann

For a StockMarket? differential equation model (that takes into account uncertainty) see http://www.raczynski.com/art/stock2.pdf. In it, they generate some predictions in ThreeDeeGraphics, such as demand/price/time. Also http://spanky.triumf.ca/www/ewi/themat.html introduces ElliotWaves?, which were discovered in the '30s but turn out to be a kind of fractal described by ChaosTheory. The ideal "2D/3D DashBoard?" should allow modelling and prediction at this level, as well as showing actual data.

http://www.fibonaccisolution.com - Fibonacci retracement and correction charts. Fibonacci Solution is a software for drawing Fibonacci shapes on graphs with historical data of equities and commodities. Support for Elliott Waves and popular technical indicators.