Financial SparklinesI first started thinking about sparklines (I didn't know the name then) after reading Edward Tufte's book thrilogy. At the time I was working for a financial company and we considered using them for our intranet.Then I came across this post on ET's site and decided to write a quick Perl implementation of the idea. The code can be found at the end of this page. The use of a vector representation allows me to easily generate sparklines in different sizes. While the examples below don't qualify as sparklines, I think they show the potential information compression that this representation yields. |
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Sparklines embedded in financial news
The text is taken from Yahoo's market overview. In the second version of it, I replaced the stock quotes for sparklines. Yearly history was used for the example, as intraday data was not available.Close: Construction spending followed suit, coming in below expectations at 0.3%, and adding to the day's bearish tone...ISM manufacturing reported relatively in-line with expectations and did little to change market sentiment...Auto sales, released throughout the day, largely disappointed with Ford (F, -4.15%) announcing an 8% drop in U.S. sales while General Motors (GM, -2.47%) announced a drop of 15%...Two of today's most influential decliners were Cardinal Health (CAH, -24.83%) and Intel (INTC, -2.17%)...
Close: Construction spending followed suit, coming in below expectations at
0.3%, and adding to the day's bearish tone...ISM manufacturing reported
relatively in-line with expectations and did little to change market
sentiment...Auto sales, released throughout the day, largely
disappointed with Ford 
announcing an 8% drop in U.S. sales
while General Motors 
announced a drop of 15%...Two of
today's most influential decliners were Cardinal Health 
and Intel 
...
Sparklines as building blocks of an interactive trading screen.
NEW May 3, 2007: I recently tested open source svg toolkit batik, which lets you turn an svg file into a graphic file ie png, jpg etc. This can be fairly useful if you want to use my code for quick rendering and portability, yet have the ability to create graphic files as output.
July 3, 2004: The first version of the perl script can be found here. I just made some changes, trying to keep the code output easier to scale among other things. there still are some scaling issues.
