completed

BBC Business Charts demo

An attempt to show news events seamlessly on stock charts

Aims

Displaying news events and stock prices in the same chart. Explaining stock price variations with the news.

This demo, created for BBC Business, charts the 6-month stock value of any company referenced by Yahoo Finance.

A simple algorithm then detects sudden changes in the stock price (the example is fixed at +/- 6% over 3 days of quotation) and displays articles queried from the Juicer to explain this change.

The goal is to enable quick research of a company - both for journalists and for readers - without having to look for articles from a specific date to understand why a stock fell.

Results

  • While the results were decent for large companies such as Apple, Google and Microsoft, the signal-to-noise ratio was way too low for all the other companies. This can be explained by how the query to Juicer was formulated and by the quality of the data available to us at the time. The results would surely be much better now.
  • Some stock market changes just cannot be explained, at least from a news perspective. Only a handful of them actually correlate with a newsworthy event (such as a lawsuit or a major product release) - and so many companies are never in the news.
  • The idea was however quite interesting, and could represent, in our opinion, a vast improvement compared to a chart provided by a third-party. This also represents an opportunity to produce re-usable and shareable charts, *à la* Quartz.

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