Advance Technology and Methods within Finance

Publication Date: 21st July 2006
Author: J. Brant Arseneau

Precipitated by the recent acknowledgment by an award being given to the company Fractal Edge for its innovative work in financial visualization, and my, timely introduction to a gifted "techno-artist" named W. Bradford Paley, I was compelled by the opportunistic, and appropriate, reason to address the ever challenging duty of delivering meaningful advancements in the field of financial visualization.

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Now, to the award winning product: Fractal:Edge. Fractal:Edge's visualization is vaguely similar to the heat-map's with some notable improvements. In essence it uses the moments of fractals to represent varying market concepts. In the figure below, for example, the company's real-time chart of the global equities market is represented by a large circle with progressively smaller ones contained inside, akin to a Venn diagram. In this depiction, the regions of the world are shown as large circles. Within those circles are rings containing what look like smaller spheres. The rings represent indexes in that region and the spheres within each of them depict the sectors within that index. Each circle, ring and sphere is color-coded based on performance, and a viewer can drill down from a global level to the individual stock level in moments.

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With profound advances in enabling technologies and a "renaissance" in thought process, data visualization is starting to gain traction in the financial services industry. As this happens, the adoption of visualization tools is likely to be rapid, particularly as automated and electronic trading takes off and market data, like Level II depth, become more accessible.

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