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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.

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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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