Category Archives: charts

Chart of the Day: The InTrade Electoral Map

Electoralmap.net puts the latest InTrade prices into graphical form: Looks like Florida alone isn’t remotely enough to get McCain into the White House. Update: Chris Masse points me to electoralmarkets.com, a sexy flash version of the above. Cool! (HT: Caveat … Continue reading

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Adventures in Technical Analysis, McClellan Oscillator Edition

When I dumped on technical analysis last month, one of the more unexpected results was a long email thread with a chap called Jeff Drake, on the subject of something called the McClellan Oscillator. He’s a big fan, while I … Continue reading

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European Storms

Chart of the day comes from the FT, which has updated its April financial weather map of Europe. Over the past three months, just about every country in the region has deteriorated: you can see why the oceans have been … Continue reading

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Chart of the Day: They are the Eggmen

This is a chart of the S&P 500, priced in terms of eggs. Notes DeForest McDuff: With the price of eggs going up 75% since 2001, one share of the S&P 500 used to buy as much as 1200 eggs … Continue reading

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Adventures in Technical Analysis, Jim Cramer Edition

If you like seeing Jim Cramer get his comeuppance, you’ll love this video. It’s a bit long, but basically on Friday June 13, Cramer told his viewers to "buy buy buy" banks, homebuilders, etc, on the strength of something called … Continue reading

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Chart of the Day: Rail Freight

Paul Krugman notes one way in which the US seems to be well ahead of the EU: it moves much more of its freight by rail. He gives a lot of good reasons for this (Europe’s got more coastline and … Continue reading

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Wikipedia: A Perfectly Acceptable Data Source

Bess Levin is taken aback by the fact that Morgan Stanley is now citing Wikipedia as a source in its research reports. Why? We’re talking here about a pretty simple chart, showing the price of gasoline in different countries around … Continue reading

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Chart of the Day: Credit Losses Per Employee

Here Is The City has put together this chart of credit losses per wholesale-banking employee, and it’s quite eye-opening, even if you discount the Mizuho outlier: Wachiovia, UBS, and Citi have all managed to rack up more than $1 million … Continue reading

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The Credit-Equity Chart, Revisited

This morning I said I’d love to see a chart showing how bond spreads have evolved relative to stock prices, connected chronologically. Next thing I know, this chart arrives in my inbox courtesy of the great Matthew Turner: You start … Continue reading

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Chart of the Day: Credit-Equity Divergence

Helen Thomas finds this chart in a report from Bank of America: Basically, the x-axis is stock prices while the y-axis is bond spreads. The red dots are What Was: they’re weekly datapoints from June 2002 to June 2007. The … Continue reading

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Chart of the Day: Mastercard vs Visa

When Mastercard went public in May 2006 its opening price was $40.30 per share; today it’s over $200. What are the chances that something similar is going to happen with Visa? About zero: (Incidentally, American Express is worth about $48 … Continue reading

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Misleading Chart of the Day: Credit Premia

Martin Wolf appends this chart to his most recent column. It shows the well-known-by-now interbank spread – the way that Libor has gapped out relative to central bank rates – and tries to decompose it into two parts: a credit … Continue reading

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Chart of the Day: Real Earnings

This chart, from the NYT, shows annual growth in real wages. What that means is that workers today are earning significantly less, in real terms, than they were a year ago: their January 2008 earnings were down 19 cents per … Continue reading

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Chart of the Day: US Box Office Receipts

This is the best chart I’ve seen all year, it’s a bit like the NameVoyager for movies. It has time along the x-axis and weekly box-office receipts along the y-axis, which means that box office grosses are reflected in long … Continue reading

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Chart of the Day: Jerome Kerviel’s P&L

Alea has found this amazing chart, showing Jerome Kerviel’s real P&L at SocGen. The thing that fascinates me is that after a very bumpy ride indeed for most of the year, suddenly Kerviel’s profit remains uncharacteristically and astonishingly static for … Continue reading

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Misleading Chart of the Day, CDS Edition

This graphic comes from Gretchen Morgenson’s front-pager in the NYT yesterday. I’m not going to try to reproduce it here, because my column width isn’t big enough to really see what’s going on. But suffice to say that it shows … Continue reading

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Chart of the Day: Debt Tranche Correlation

This is nerdy (the chart’s from Alea, the finance nerd’s blog of choice), but it’s also interesting. Jane Baird reports: Correlation on the five-year investment-grade Markit iTraxx Europe index — a measure of investor fears of a system-wide crash — … Continue reading

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When a Forecast Shouldn’t be Charted

Silly chart of the day comes from Morgan Stanley, whose Jonathan Garner thinks that emerging-market infrastructure spending is likely to grow by about 12% per year over the next decade. That’s an interesting forecast, but it’s basically one number. Charts, … Continue reading

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Chart of the Day: Sock Manufacturing in the US

Pie charts are generally anathema to Tufte-heads and other connoisseurs of chartistry: they use far too much space to convey far too little information. But I like the one at the right, from an NPR story about Fort Payne, Alabama … Continue reading

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Chart of the Day: Oil Prices

From Stephen Gordon comes this chart: Gordon notes that the Canadian dollar/yen exchange rate today is pretty much the same as it was back on September 4, which means that the price of oil has risen about the same amount … Continue reading

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Inequality Chart of the Day

From Will Wilkinson: The Gini coefficient is the generally-accepted standard measure of inequality, and the dark-green bars show the amount of after-tax income inequality in 16 OECD countries (click on the chart for a bigger version). The difference between the … Continue reading

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Misleading Chart of the Day

The Wall Street Journal has a story entitled "Tech Stocks Get Giddy 🙂" today – and yes, the smiley is in the headline. It’s accompanied by a dreadful chart showing three stocks which are currently at all-time highs: Research in … Continue reading

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Chart of the Day: Fed Funds

Who says that the Fed hasn’t cut the Fed funds rate between meetings?
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The Return of Hans Rosling

The Hans Rosling video you’ve all been waiting for.
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Charting for Business Geeks

Mathematica’s charting abilities.
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