Visualizing Financial Data

Chapter 3 Security Assessment

Assessing securities requires the most granular analysis of all investment processes. The approved universe of investment vehicles may differ widely across or even within firms. It may include stocks, bonds, commingled funds (for example, mutual funds or hedge funds), ETFs, money market instruments, currencies, or derivatives. Regardless of the breadth of securities in the approved universe, portfolio managers and analysts inside and outside the firm are tasked with assessing them. This chapter proposes visualization designs to those who assess securities for comparative and competitive purposes and would like to see a standardized view of those securities.

We introduce a new framework for standardizing the presentation of stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and ETFs to make each more easily compared as an investment option. A framework can be defined as a supporting structure to an entity, which in this case is the investment option. We extend this definition of a framework through a visualization approach that supports a range of key data points of each listed security. First we introduce and define how that framework is designed; second we apply it to the creation of profiles for stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and ETFs; and third, we present the resulting collection of profiles. Throughout this chapter we show how the framework is constructed with blueprints for each security type.

NOTE

The visualizations throughout this chapter use representative ...