It is fascinating how much information you can uncover with just a few years of price data in Tableau. In this example, we use just two data items to examine the history of Netflix stock price (NASDAQ NFLX.) The data items used are date and closing price, adjusted for splits.
Simple annual review
Add color coding for price level
Switch color coding based on year-over-year price growth
Show monthly growth against prior month, highlighting best & worst months
Also, several historic events are called out on this chart with annotations
Divide the chart into annual panes
Emphasis on best and worst months each year
Switching to a “pure” growth emphasis
This eliminates the “baseline effect” problem
Switch from a line to a bar chart of monthly price growth
Much easier to read individual values, find outliers
Deemphasize the bars
Emphasize annual averages of the monthly growth rates
We hope you have enjoyed this quick tour of possibilities with Tableau. As you can see, there are many simple yet powerful ways to examine price data over time. We hope you will have the opportunity to download these examples and experiment or to try some of these techniques with your own data.
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Posted on June 7th, 2011 by
Excellent Stephen! Thanks the great examples.
This is a great walkthrought, Stephen. I like the way you progress the options.
Nice work
Only
one I feel is unnecessary is the color coding in the second chart. The price level is already encoded in the line and y axis so I don´t feel the colored line adds info.
Sorry to be that “guy” ;P
Hi Victor,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I agree that the 2nd example is not all that interesting or useful by itself, but is shown as part of the progression to step 3.
Best,
Stephen
Very instructional.. would love if Tableau could allow some way to “insert business events” on the time dimension so that they could become visible on a line chart with time as the X-axis (you did that in the 4th sheet by way of static labels depicting what else was going on in the business world at that juncture.