Sunday, August 7, 2011

Stock/Product Comparisons with SVGo



The latest visualization tool written with SVGo is stockproduct, a tool to compare stock prices with the release of products over time. This is a Go version of the tool described earlier. Like other SVGo tools, stockproduct reads data from XML (see example below) and produces SVG.

<stockproduct title="Apple Purchases and Stock Price">
<sdata price="12.40" date="2002-04" product="Ti PowerBook" image="tipb.jpg"/>
<sdata price="7.38" date="2002-08" product="Jaguar" image="jaguar.png"/>
<sdata price="261.09" date="2010-04" product="iPad 3G" image="ipad3g.jpg"/>
<sdata price="399.68" date="2011-07" product="Lion" image="lion.png"/>
</stockproduct>

The example above plots my purchases of Apple products vs. the stock price.

Stockproduct scales the graph by the specified size, and the graph can be placed anywhere on the SVG canvas. Note that every chart component: bars, images, product names. prices, scales, and images may be turned on and off using command line options.

This example:

compares the adjusted closing price vs. operating system releases from Microsoft and Apple, ordered by the date of release. Between 1991-2001, both organizations were able to keep pace, with Microsoft releasing Windows 3.1, 95, 98, and Apple releasing System 7, 8, and 9.

However, between 2001 and 2005 Apple steadily released five versions of Mac OS X (Cheetah, Puma, Jaguar, Panther, and Tiger), but in the same time period, Microsoft released only XP. After 2005, Apple released Leopard, Snow Leopard and Lion, where Microsoft released VIsta and Windows 7.

From 1991-2007, there were no large differences in stock prices, but in 2007, the there was large gain for Apple, growing from $184.70 to $386.90, with Microsoft's price staying flat, at $23.75 at the release of Windows 7 in 2007.

In fact the range of prices and releases during past 20 years is Microsoft: $2-23.75, and 6 operating system releases, with Apple's stock price ranging from $4.11 - $386.90, with 11 operating system releases (not including iOS).

Here's the same data with Apple products on the left, peaking at Lion, and Microsoft products on the right: