THE MARKET RADAR is a new way to get a broad, historical view of stock prices. Our first radar tool displays nine years of weekly price changes for 500 companies — more than 200,000 data points in all. Presenting such a large database in a single picture makes it possible to see market dynamics that might otherwise be invisible.
What It Shows You
Each weekly price change is represented by a single dot on the screen, colored green if the stock went up that week and red if it went down. Large movements are colored brightly, while smaller changes are dimmer. The dots are arranged in a grid, with each row representing a single company's performance, and columns representing points in time. The labels at top show the passage of time. The companies are grouped by sector and industry.A Visual Tour
The grid-based layout makes it easy to spot key features of the market's past movements. Broad market events show up as vertical stripes. In the screenshot below, we've labeled the 1998 downturn and rebound, and the turmoil following September 11, 2001.You can see differences between sectors as well. A volatile sector like technology appears as a speckled band of bright green and red dots, each corresponding to a dramatic rise or fall in one stock. The less volatile utilities sector, on the other hand, show a distinctly quieter pattern.
But the utilities sector hasn't been entirely quiet. Look closely and you will see a few horizontal lines of brighter dots. These lines correspond to a handful of unusual utilities which have had a choppier ride. Because the Market Radar reveals so many potentially interesting details like these, we've provided a "magnifying glass" for a close-up view. The magnified area is shown at the right. In this case, we've magnified a region containing the four most unusual power producers — AES, Calpine, Dynegy and Mirant. What do these companies have in common? They've all been hit with worries stemming from Enron's collapse.
These are just a few examples of the patterns you may see with the Market Radar. Try it yourself and see what you can find. And stay tuned over the next few weeks for an intraday Market Radar showing live, minute-by-minute data.
