25 October 2008

A sea of red - following the US stock markets

Some time ago I linked from my Economics home page to the SmartMoney.com Map of the Market. It is what is called a treemap and shows a map of US equities with the area for an individual company varying by market capitalisation and the colour by whether the stock has risen or dropped in price.

I recently came across a much more comprehensive data visualisation source, FINVIZ.com (HT to information aesthetics). Currently it presents a gloomy picture but perhaps points to some buying opportunities for those that are contrarian. To quote Warren Buffett in an opinion piece in The Times on 19 October 2008: "Be greedy when other are fearful and be fearful when others are greedy."

The market capitalisations of the major US airlines are now so small that they are actually quite hard to find on this visualisation tool - do not expect to find them in the S&P 500 view - look in the Full view in the Services block on the right near the bottom under "Maj".

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