Index Movement - Visualization

Why?

To keep myself from overthinking or having negative thoughts, I should focus my energy on something creative. Also, the creativity should pique my curiosity. Essentially, I should spend time learning something. Personal finance is something that we monitor and learn about in a daily manner. The PF has a variety of numbers and data to deal with. It’s more like clay that allows you to come up with any sculpture.

The idle brain is the devil’s workshop.

Somewhere, I read that one can’t learn something new altogether. Instead, he should progress gradually. It’s more like stepping on the adjacent tiles than jumping on something a few feet away. For me, data visualization is new. I am very much an amateur. I am confident that my understanding of the capital market is quite good—at least the fundamentals.

I feel the amalgamation of these two topics—financial data visualization—would be beneficial.

How?

The financial data is available for free or almost free (not straight-forward free but scrapable). With enough time and effort, we can get this data on hand. Getting the data is only one-fourth of the work.

The heavy lifting is in the second half—the visualization. The D3 is a harder nut to crack. But it’s a good challenge to have. I have never drawn a line using D3. This work involves multiple lines deviating from the reference line in both directions.

What?

• The purpose of the activity
• Data
• Tools to visualize
• What is the outcome?

The outcome of this could be a simple line chart - months (x-axis) vs Index value (y-axis).

This line chart is simple. Could be easier to achieve. And so, this should act as a PoC—to gain confidence in drawing D3 lines. If this is a PoC, what is the real project?

This is going to be challenging. And it is a good challenge to have.

See also

• Why Data Visualization