The power of visual representation
I was in Los Angeles again this weekend attending Freedom Trader Intensive by Peak Potentials; one of the seminars that are included in my Quantum Leap two year self development program.
While I have bought stocks in the past of public companies that I have personally worked for, in general I really don’t know much about trading yet. Our trainer Courtney Smith did a fantastic job teaching us the fundamentals of low risk and high returns position trading techniques. We learned about the psychology of trading, channel breakout, trend analysis, seasonality, risk management and so much more that are beyond the scope of this blog.
We also spent a lot of time learning how to read and analyze charts and looking for areas where some of the techniques we learned were manifesting through historical data. I got to know eps as earnings per share rather than encapsulated postscript. It was all fascinating but the designer in me couldn’t help but think how all of this would almost be impossible if it wasn’t for the visual representation of the data. Working on diagrams and charts are not necessarily my favourite tasks but after this weekend, I will make it a point to treat them with much more respect.
I will end this post with a chart that was shared at the event. The term, a picture is worth a thousand words is familiar to many but for this chart it will have to be adjusted to a picture is worth 70,401! It shows what would have happened if $100 was invested on April 30th 1950 in both the S&P 500 and the Small Caps market with adjustments based on seasonality. Of course there are many other factors to consider, but in general it shows that the markets do perform better from October 1st to May 1st.
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If you would like to improve your presentations and documents using charts and diagrams, there are great video tutorials on Lynda.com. There you will also find a short documentary on Duarte Design, Presentation Design Studio that discusses the power of presentations and how Nancy Duarte started and grew a very successful business based primarily on presentations. She also has two great books, slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations, and Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences that you might find helpful as well.
