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Entries Tagged as 'Financial Markets'

The dashboard to end all dashboards

May 24th, 2011 · Comments Off · Financial Markets, Information Design

A friend kindly points out this dashboard. The developers at Crystal Bull should be proud of themselves. I think there must be a Hall of Fame award for this somewhere. If not, it should be invented. In all seriousness, if you’re interested in what a good dashboard should look like you can always start with [...]

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Work that information a little harder, please

January 10th, 2011 · Comments Off · Financial Markets, Information Design

I like the FT, I really do, but their information graphics leave something to be desired. Take this one. What is this information graphic trying to illustrate? One imagines, at the most basic, they are trying to show how much of each bank’s total revenue is used to pay their employees, and then compare this [...]

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Quantitative Easing (QE) explained, and then some

December 29th, 2010 · 2 Comments · Financial Markets, Market Definitions

Do a Google video search for quantitative easing explained (something you would typically do, right?) and there are some interesting results. First, there is the way boring FT QE explainer, which looks like it belongs in a powerpoint deck from 1995. Please gentlemen, take a look at the types of info graphics that NYTimes is [...]

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Dueling charts

December 29th, 2010 · Comments Off · Financial Markets, Information Design

Both the NYTimes and The Economist have sets of charts outlining the year that was, from an economic data point of view. They both focus on: – Unemployment – Inflation – Housing In addition the NYTimes looks at: – Corporate profits and PE ratios – Price of health care While the Economist chooses to focus [...]

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“… and on fax page # 1,932,765,358 paragraph 3 …”

June 11th, 2010 · Comments Off · Financial Markets, Usability

The FT has a good article describing the amount of data the US Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission received from Goldman after a request for information about its mortgage-backed security trading activities. (Essentially a rather … cough … large amount.) While Goldman is hardly playing nice, the more serious issue highlighted in the article is how [...]

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” … the computers have gone wild”

June 7th, 2010 · Comments Off · Financial Markets

A co-worker sent along this link. It’s a video about how quants and computers are changing Wall Street and, more importantly, the very nature of banking. It’s a bit over the top, has weird character intros in German where the rest of the video is in English, and the main theme (bankers are ruining the [...]

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Trading precognition

June 5th, 2010 · Comments Off · Financial Markets

The WSJ had an interesting story (subscription required) last week about how some traders appear to be getting a edge by receiving stock price data before the wider market. The article features an appearance by Themis (who wrote a paper I discussed in an earlier blog post), as well as this description of how TFS [...]

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Toxic trading

May 26th, 2010 · 2 Comments · Financial Markets

In a conversation with a friend the other day about the merits (or lack thereof) of high-speed computerized trading, I recalled this paper, Toxic Equity Trading Order Flow on Wall Street (pdf) from Themis Trading. It decries the profits earned by high speed trading firms that result from better and faster computers, taking advantage of [...]

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Swap lines

May 10th, 2010 · Comments Off · Financial Markets, Market Definitions

I read this morning in the WSJ that in addition to loans from the IMF and European governments to help bail out Greece, the Fed is pitching in with swap lines. After reading that I thought it would be useful to link to the Fed’s recent paper describing how swap lines work. The Federal Reserve’s [...]

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Kids need their candy, banks need their money, countries need their debt

May 9th, 2010 · Comments Off · Financial Markets, Market Definitions

Paddy Hirsch looks at the role of counter party risk and how it’s becoming a hot topic again due to the recent debt crisis in Europe. Counterparty risk from Marketplace on Vimeo. The compelling, perhaps scary point, is that what we see now happening in Europe is pretty much what happened in 2008 when (as [...]

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