FinVis: Visualizing the Complex Nature of Financial Markets

Abstract

Investors are constantly looking for insights through comparisons on stock market data to assist in the discovery of well-priced stocks. Modern stock market applications and research allow for a range of visualizations to be produced whilst enabling the viewing of complete datasets, however, these tools are often split, not providing queries and analysis in the same view, therefore, limiting the potential of the proposed solution. Within this thesis, a new system for performing analysis and comparison is proposed, a web-based application which is able to assist in the exploratory visual analysis and visualization generation of financial data. FinVis allows for over 500 stocks to be queried and 10,000 to be imported, before displaying interactive and customizable visualizations to assist in the discovery of bargains or good investments on the market. The application includes tools to save, store and load queries alongside a visual analytic display to enable customization and more complex individual views to be generated. A complete set of interactions are also provided to the user, whilst enabling all of this exploration to take place with real-time and historical data being provided through a financial API to the user’s web browser. The thesis enables future work within the area of exploratory financial visualization to take place, providing core concepts in a comparative nature to potential researchers and investors alike.