Jaanga geeDoc: S&P 500 Motion Chart

Features

At last, every symbol of the Standard & Poor 500 index displayed in a single motion chart - Jaanga geeDoc SP500.

You can view the instant instant replay of the last 15 to 20 minutes of trading simply by dragging the slider bar at the bottom of the screen.

The S&P 500 is the reference standard of market indices, so it feels appropriate to use this index as the reference standard for Jaanga development. The standard that needs to be achieved is to display as many of the activities as possible of 500 different organizations in as close to real-time as possible while still open to as much technical augmentation and human interaction as possible.

Putting it another way, you must forget how you do it on paper. The current way of proceeding is to look at an entire market (or whatever data set) but only to be able to see one symbol at a time. It's like having some weird camera pointed towards many people walking up and down a sidewalk that can only show you one person at a time.

The Jaanga camera wants to show you everybody - all the stocks - so you can see just how everybody moves together. Everybody avoids that hole in the pavement. They all stop when the light turns red. Real-time data behaves the same way. The era of looking at one item at a time must come to an end. We must begin to see markets and other data as moving swarms. This is the only way to readily identify outliers or black swan events.

About Jaanga: John Tukey + Exploratory Data Analysis = Awesomeness

John Tukey - courtesy Wikipedia

John Wilder Tukey (June 16, 1915 – July 26, 2000) was an American statistician.

I am not a statistician and, as yet, have only the vaguest notion of the history and development of statistics and the visualization of data. Therefore there may well be even more wonderful figures in the world of statistics to honor. But for the moment John Tukey provides me with more than enough delight and inspiration.

Why is Tukey so cool?

Tukey invents the computer terms: "bits" and "software". Actually there's a byte more than that.

Jaanga gDocs: Easy Start to Viewing 50 Stocks at Once

A major objective of the Jaanga web site is to provide you with easy-to-use tools for viewing large quantities of numbers. Certainly some of the techniques presented here may be complex or time-consuming, but there should always also be some quite accessible methods.As they say:

Space travel won't take off until everyone does rocket science in backyards.

The accompanying chart can be use to monitor up to fifty stock symbols and indices. The sample file displays all thirty stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average - all editable, zoomable and clickable. There may be some rocket science here, but it's just serving to make the technology more accessible.

About Jaanga: Tufte is so Old School, Tufte is so New Cool

We can say that Edward Tufte is the world's chief curator on the visual display of quantitative information. As c2.com says. Tufte wants you to "show people as much data as possible with as little ornamentation as possible". Tufte has been doing this sunce 1975 and there's probably no one better at doing this than Tufte.

But what is the "this" that Tufte does?

Jaanga gDocs: Entire US Stock Market in Single Chart

6,670 Symbols - Every US stock in one chart - Image captured 01-27-2011

Admittedly this chart has too many data points too close together to be of much analytical use, nevertheless this image is remarkable for two reasons.

1. The first element is that any time you load the underlying Google Docs spreadsheet, Google Docs automatically retrieves and updates the data from Nasdaq. Nasdaq publishes data for every stock listed on the NYSE, AMEX and Nasdaq itself. As of today's writing that is 6,670 symbols. The data includes symbol, price, market capitalization, full company name, industry & sector, year of IPO, latest price as well as a link to the Nasdaq web page with latest data. That's over 53,000 fresh data-points that arrive at your desktop within seconds of your asking. And it works every time.

Jaanga hCharts: Timely Update

Screen Capture from Jaanga hCharts 3.02 showing new Trails feature.

A minor update of the Jaanga hCharts applet is now available.

As always there are minor improvements and bug fixes everywhere.

About Jaanga: The Deluge of Data

Image from the Economist's Special Report on managing information

If you look at the About Jaanga page it says. "The thesis of this web site is that if the world is to prevail over the deluge of data then entirely new methods of displaying that data must be established."

So what is this "Deluge of Data"?

It's been around for some time. The Boston Globe says five centuries: Information overload, the early years.

Processing the Deluge of Data Using Google Docs

Image captured 01-18-2011 - 3200+ stocks on NASDAQ - Apple highlighted

The thesis of this web site is that if the world is to prevail over the deluge of data then entirely new methods of displaying that data must be established.

Some of these methods may require huge data centers and exotic transmission methods. If, however, such methods are to be widely implemented and provide insight to large numbers of people, then at least at some level, the methods must be made accessible and understandable using readily available and inexpensive tools.

I am extremely happy to report that you can create highly insightful charts using Google Docs Spreadsheets that process many thousands of data points in near real-time.

Just as exciting is that the spreadsheets are not demos but display actual usable data. The data is is not delayed, the data arrives in a matter of seconds or so after the actual transaction.

The link below allows you to access three spreadsheets that in total provide you with the current movements of the 6,600+ stock on the three major US exchanges. You can just view a chart but you are really encouraged open up the spreadsheets and use these to create your own charts.

Link to source code: Jaanga GDocs on GitHub

Why Do You Want Photorealistic Charts?

From: Creating 3D Chart  in Papervision 3D

A thesis of this site is that those six Bloomberg screens that the aging hedge fund dude stares at will soon become a scenario of a sunset industry.

The Wii/Kinect generation will perform very similar functions but the kids will interact with the numbers in the mileau of an evolved First Person Shooter (FPS).

Instead of numbers flashing there will be flows and patterns and particle physics and more.

So, of course, there will be anti-aliaising, smooth shading and high frame rates per second.

But do you really need shadows, day light and photo realism when you are doing mere data analysis?

Jaanga 3.0.1 Alpha ~ A Small Update

Jaanga showing the S&P 500 A-F with the Dark Green theme

Please click on this link:

Jaanga 3.0.1 Alpha

This is the latest release of the web app that enables you to monitor and compare the performance of hundreds of stocks at the same time.

In this minor release, several appearance issues have been taken care of.