Something I have been thinking about recently is how
students new to the use of financial information come to grips with visualising
the information as data. Now my corporate sensibilities may come out somewhat
in this post as much of my use of financial information as data was taught
there but the key element is to make the information into data that can be a
weapon that you use for your assignment.
Let us look at the example of the share price of a
company (I have picked Papa John’s Pizza) and I can go to the investor
relations page of the company and obtain this information.
Just type in the company name followed by the phrase
“investor relations” and you should get a top hit of the investor relations
page (which is a page where listed companies need to disclose and publish
particular affairs).
Now somewhere within the investor relations page is a
section that will show the share price, Company A and Company B may call the
section a different thing but fundamentally we are looking for the section of
the investor relations page focused on the share price.
For this particular company the page was called Stock
Information and I was able to obtain the last share price as well as the
highest and lowest share price throughout the year.
The most interesting
part is what I am going to call the time series chart at the bottom of
the screen grab that tells an interesting story. Here we have the share price
of the company according to set dates throughout the year. By visualising the
information to data we can see that there had been a steady rise from May 2013
up to April 2014 and that has subsequently followed by a fall in the share
price to the present day.
Consequently there is the temptation to look at key time
periods where there has been a significant shift in the share price. However,
Papa John’s International is one company amongst thousands in an interconnected
stock exchange system. With this line of thought wanting to look at the
comparison between Papa John’s share price and that of the stock exchange where
it is listed (NASDAQ) makes sense.
I go to the Reuters
website (and there are many other sources that can do similar), lookup Papa
John’s and in the Charts section see a section called Comparisons where I can
compare Papa John’s International with NASDAQ.
Now that I am comparing two related sets of information
against each other the performance of Papa John’s International has essentially
followed the performance of the market (a possible exception could be from
April 2014-June 2014). It is after recognising, retrieving and visualising
information on the connection between company and stock market can share price
performance be judged.
A word of warning for those considering a similar type of
visual for their assignments is to make sure they acknowledge the intellectual
debt they owe. In other words, cite and reference it. The Learning Resources webpage has a
referencing section under Library Guides that will prove useful but it is worth
remembering that a visual like the one above will be referenced as a weblink.
References:
Papa John's Pizza (2014) Investor Relations Available at: http://ir.papajohns.com/ (Accessed 12 June 2014)
Reuters (2014) Charts: Papa John's International Inc. Available at: http://uk.reuters.com/business/quotes/chart?symbol=PZZA.O (Accessed 12 June 2014)