Black Saturn Productions - Stock Market Map

Overview

The Black Saturn Stock Market Map is a variant on the popular SmartMoney.com Map of the Market. It applies the tree map visualization technique to company fundamental data. (Smart Money operates on price change data.) The map is filled with rectangles whose size is initially keyed to the market capitalization while the color is keyed to a performance measure of the company. Initially, the map shows market sectors. Clicking on any sector rectangle changes the map to show the industries within that sector. Similarly, clicking on an industry drills down to the companies within the sector. Dragging the mouse over any rectangle produces detail information on the company in the status bar and on tool tips.

The map enables the user to contrast comparible sectors, industries, and companies simultaneously in two dimensions. Rectangles color can be keyed to variety of company performance measures, such as PE and PEG ratios, profit margin, return on equity. Research measures available for rectangle color include analyst recommendation, recommendation change, and growth expectations.

The map is a powerful alternative to traditional stock screeners. I personally like to use PEG ratio to value securities. The map easily shows where value in the market lies using this measure. Similarly, the map highlights the Warren Buffet favored stocks with high profit margins and ROEs. The map works well if you go for the Zaks style of picking stocks using changes in analyst recommendations.

Technical Highlights

The Stock Market map is supported by a number of programs, most of which run in the background on servers which provide the data behind the displays. These programs include:

• a data collection program,
• a data summarization program,
• visual data quality inspection,
• loading checked data into server relational database,
• a servlet which delivers the relational data via XML responses, and
• an applet (and not publically available application) which reads the XML responses and generates the market map on the information it contains

Equity data of US corporations is collected by screen scraping a variety of publicly available financial websites. This can be tricky and requires considerable maintenance as data and page format changes, new and deleted data, new markets and securities, and data availability instability makes collection a less than automatic affair. Data is collected weekly, a period that reflects the volatility of the data being collected.

The data collected during screen scraping is actually surplus to the requirements of stock market map, as is kept for other data analysis purposes. Additionally, the data is not optimally structured for delivery to the stock market map. A data summarization program reorganizes the into flat XML files that deliver the map data in an efficient manner for each company. The program also collects all the data for each company in an industry and averages them into an industry summary. Similarly industry data is summarized into sector data. The summarized data is stored as a set of XML files in a staging area that is private to Black Saturn operations.

Besides providing unique data discovery capabilities, data visualization programs work very well as a data quality tool. Since visualization programs allow you to view a great quantities of data very quickly, data errors become apparent very quickly. So before the data goes out to the market map server it gets the once over using the map for data inspection.

Checked data is transferred into the relational Equities Market database, after which it is available to the map programs for viewing. The loader program uses JDBC, which is better than EJB in moving flat file data into a relational database.

A servlet accepts HTTP requests, accesses the Equities Market database, and responds with a datafeed in the format of an XML file. These request/responses can be made from any program that wants to format and display the information, including a browser that uses a XSL stylesheet to transform the file. The Stock Market Map applet is just one example of a visualization program that utilizes market map datafeed. A standalone application, which includes security features supported by J2EE, is available upon request.

Check out the Stock Market Map

The basic Stock Market Map is a free public program available over the Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator browsers.

System requirements

To run the stock market explorer properly you must have:

• Browser - IE5 or Netscape6 or better
• Java PlugIn 1.4 - if you don't have this you the browser will ask if you want to download and install it

How to access the Explorer and its datafeeds

The Explorer is a great tool for finding valuable stocks by drilling down on company fundamental data. Try it at

If you want to have a go at providing your own visualization program around the data used by the Stock Market Map you can access the datafeed directly.

Plug your own data into the Stock Market Map

Got your own data that you would like to show off to staff or custormers in a new light? The Stock Market Map can be delivered as a premium Web enabled application dedicated to your own data. Access to the program can be restricted to authorized staff and clients using password protection. New features can be added to your application on a timely basis over the Internet. The map can direct traffic to targeted areas of your websites and applications when particular rectangles are selected. It also makes a great data checking program for the quality assurance departments. Contact Tom Kokoska at tom@blacksaturnsoftware.com for more information.