| In these pages 1⅓ months ago somebody reported on a book on finance that I’d written. Which caused me to discover Hacker News — slow, but got there eventually. Please allow me to bring a gift: a free (proper free, not fake-free freemium) ‘standard’ that I think should be widely used. Charts in financial markets are a mess: $ or € or £ or ¥ or 元 or ₩ or ₹ might be represented by different symbols on different charts. Indeed, sometimes different symbols on charts created by the same author and appearing on the same page. A consistent set of markers would allow readers to focus more on the meaning of the data, and less on the distraction of attempting to decode the markers. I have, with great artistic and technical care, created such a standard, open source,
https://github.com/jdaw1/chart_markers/
and released under the Boost licence. The best page to start at might be https://github.com/jdaw1/chart_markers/blob/main/Documentation/ChartMarkers_Gallery.md
except that GitHub’s web server is sometimes reluctant to serve the thousand SVG images on a single page, so there is also an HTML translation at http://www.jdawiseman.com/papers/Chart_Markers/ChartMarkers_Gallery.html I think it’s a great standard for financial firms and press to use. If you and you alone use it, then you would be consistent for your readers: a good thing. If others also use it, it would be even easier for your readers: even better. Several questions: • It needs promotion and encouragement. How should this be done (issue 2)? • If it becomes a success, it would need governance arrangements (issue 4). • Good suggestions for improvements welcome — see Grumbles page first. https://github.com/jdaw1/chart_markers/blob/main/Documentation/ChartMarkers_Grumbles.md |
Quantitative work — finance being the obvious but not unique example — often suffer intensely from data-clutter, sometimes to the point of paralysis.
A visual approach is a great solution, this however requires some design, taste, and some "fat tony" intuition (I think programmers often aren't as good as they think they are at charting because the data is just a number to them) — one should take the time to design some beautiful, simple conventions & symbols; that's exactly what these are.
To quote Marco Pierre White: Genius is knowing how to let things be simple.