TASK ANALYSIS

Because of the large number and heterogeneous nature of market participants, it was necessary to isolate a target audience for the visualization system. Each class of investors has its own goals, its own level of risk-tolerance, its own beliefs about how the market works and ultimately its own investing strategies.

An exploratory survey was undertaken of the hypotheses that underlie people's decisions about which securities to buy and when. The results of this preliminary analysis were used to construct a rough classification of investors, strategies, and visualization techniques along several dimensions, including:

• frequency of trading
• level of training
• investment philosophy (firm-foundation, castle-in-the-air)
• information source (newspaper, CNN, the web, etc.)

This investigation led to the conclusion that amateur investors would be the most interesting target of our visualization. For this group of investors, the process leading up to a decision to invest was characterized as essentially a filtering operation across the space of all potential investments. Typically an investor will have generated an internal model which causes them to look for stocks in a certain industry, with certain P/E ratios, certain levels of historical performance, certain ratings from analysts, or of certain sizes. They then perform a search through some or all of the available stocks in order to locate those which satisfy their desired criteria.

Based upon this strategic model, we sought a visualization which would support this type of searching, as well as aid in portfolio optimization and build intuition about the structure and behavior of the market.

PAGE 1 : Motivation
PAGE 2 : Task Analysis
PAGE 3 : Theoretical Model
PAGE 4 : Visualization
PAGE 5 : Interface Features
PAGE 6 : Future Direction

>> RETURN TO RESUME