Visualising time series data – An example with share price information

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)