Visualizing the Stock Market

INFO VISUALIZATION: Speaking of money maps, Smart Money has an interesting way of visualizing the stock market's ebb and flow: Map of the Market. This is very similar to Treemap, and similarly it allows you to get a good handle on thousands or millions of datapoints in only a few minutes of exploration. That being said, the interface needs some work (but I sympathize, Java’s Swing is quite unruly and difficult to do well).







Shown here is a summary of the last 52 weeks of the market. The bigger the square, the bigger the market-cap for the company. The brightest yellow signifies a stock has gained 30%, while the brightest blue is the opposite. The squares are also grouped into areas to show their market sector, and the sectors are sized appropriately based on their percentage of overall market. I've always liked treemap and this is a great dataset to use it with!



There's also a link to make a map of your portfolio, but I would just download Treemap and build your own version. Treemap is pretty difficult to use at first but it pays off with use.