tableau public is now available! What’s not to love? Free web hosting of your visualization and a free desktop license of tableau public, based on the award-winning, rapid data visualization tools in Tableau Desktop and Tableau Server. With tableau public, you can learn the breadth of Tableau while sharing your insights with the world on any blog or web site.
Freakalytics is excited to be featured on the home page of tableau public, highlighting our stock market returns dashboard!
Click here to read the details about this dashboard, from our blog post last June.
Embedding tableau public content is simple and quick. Your web site visitors will need NO software installation, since Tableau depends on native Ajax functionality used by sites like GMail. Although not officially supported in the current release, tableau public is viewable and functions interactively on the iPhone based on our simple tests!
This editorial highlights a fascinating yet simple theory, that super-smart people (the numerati) have created extremely complex and little understood financial instruments that helped drive us to the brink of economic ruin. These instruments originally had applications of merit that were reasonable. However, the profit potential was too large and the opportunity for application in almost any area of investing was simply too great a temptation. Over the past decade, derivatives have become the instrument of choice for a variety of hedge funds, investment firms and even once staid and conservative insurance companies.
AIG is an excellent example of where these instruments can take a company. To date, AIG has required “just” $183 billion in taxpayer bailouts to date. That’s $183,000,000,000.00 or greater than the combined endowments of the top 15 universities in the US (ranked by endowment as of 2008.) Wow, we could have endowed another 15 top universities in the US with just the losses created by AIG!
Economic Indicators and S&P Composite Returns from 1901-2008 A Dashboard to Explore Past, Present and Future Results by Year
When creating a dashboard, two critical questions to ask include, “what are the right metrics” and “what collection of graphs will optimize exploration and understanding from a complex relationship between multiple metrics”? This example uses historic economic and stock market data to explore these concepts and to provide powerful insights into stock market patterns relative to economic conditions. This interactive dashboard is powered by tableau public, a new service of Tableau Software. One means of interacting with this dashboard is data point brushing, highlight data in a part of the dashboard by single-clicking and dragging your mouse across data points of interest.
” Selecting the right metrics can be difficult but is a vital step to improve insight. Frequently, tradition dictates which metrics people are accustomed to receiving for a particular subject. However, these metrics could leave out vital pieces of information making the standard metrics potentially misleading. For example, many stock market discussions ignore or minimize the impact of inflation on historic returns. To understand the stock market over extended time periods, inflation can severely skew interpretation as inflation has varied widely over the past 100 years in the US.
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