NEW: create beautiful charts

Dear All,

We just released our new “Multi-Charts”. It lets you chart together, and stack vertically, our many time series like: stocks, etfs, industry & sectors, economic data, your custom series, etc. You can see them under DATA->CHARTS->Multi

We tried very hard to make it friendly & useful with just the right amount of features to create impactful charts. You can also save your charts and see our sample charts from the drop down menu on the top left.

Here’s a sample of some of the features

Let us know what you think. Thank You


Looks very nice, Marco! Is there a way to print the charts?

Walter

The most recent ##UNRATE is plotted as 4.9% on 6/30/2016.

BLS only released figure on 7/8/2016
Employment Situation Summary
Transmission of material in this release is embargoed until
8:30 a.m. (EDT) Friday, July 8, 2016

So it is reported too early, nobody knew the figure before 7/8/2016.

Also series ##UNRATE not working in custom formulas.



Marco - are all of these plots point in time? And point in time to when P123 users could actually see and use the data? (See Geov’s comment). FRED stats are usually 1-3 months delayed in publication.

Also, is there a point to including S&P 500 Yield when Blended Yield is also offered? I thought the original series was a problem.

Steve

charting is not a simulation engine . Also you simply cannot chart time series with revisions, i.e. point in time data. A point of reference must be chosen otherwise there are multiple values for the same date. What to do with moving averages for example? We chart the latest revisions for point in time data.

##UNRATE is a series with revisions and can only be used in Multi chart & Macro chart . It is not available in the main engine (sims , screens, custom formulas, etc)

Thanks

Playing with the pre-built ‘Housing Starts vs Mortgage Rates’ chart. When I change the housing starts plot to %YoY, the chart is blank. Is that a bug?

Walter

YoY%: Log scale cannot chart -ve values. We need to show an error for clarity…

Of course! And thank you for the select box to hide plots. That’s very handy.

Walter

Marco - first of all, this charting ability is very nice. I like it. However, I never understood the “multiple values for the same date” argument. There is only one value that was known at the time, the rest is hindsight. If you were dealing with a company such as Enron, would you rather see the quarterly results as reported, or as restated? I think the answer has to be that you would want to see what was originally reported for the sake of historical accuracy.

The way you are presenting the FRED data has two issues. The first is that despite being a chart and not a simulation engine, it appears to be the best tool available for developing rule-based simulations and there is no clear notification to the user that the data is not historically accurate. Second is that there will be multiple versions of the same FRED data, one version for multi charts and another for macro charts and simulation. There will be significant confusion especially for new users.

Some databases handle the revisions issue by presenting two different time series: As Reported (AR), and Most Recent (MR). I would like to suggest that both series be offered and will clear up all conceptual problems.

Thanks again for the multi charts
Steve

[quote]
##UNRATE is a series with revisions and can only be used in Multi chart & Macro chart . It is not available in the main engine (sims , screens, custom formulas, etc)

Marco, unemployment figure is never revised, so it should be available as a series. Revisions are to number of jobs created, etc. Attached latest recession indicator based on UNRATE.


Pretty sure I’ve heard of unemployment rates being revised in the news. In any event that’s what the data says. ALFRED gives us multiple point in values for ##UNRATE:

For date 4/1/14 we have

6.3 from 05/02/2014 to 01/08/2015
6.2 from 01/09/2015 to 12/31/9999

The purpose of this tool is for convenience, spotting trends, and for creating stacked charts. Using the latest revisions is perfectly fine for that. Revisions don’t really affect trends much. Being able to use as-reported would be misleading (think GDP). For true backtesting purposes there will be a way to use them in the P.I.T engines where everything will be adjusted for the observation date.

Multi charts was designed to fill an apparent hole in charting. Sure you can chart , sort of , on FRED. Then you have Yahoo and stockcharts, etc. But nothing with the coverage we have and ease of use in mixing all sorts of series. And we tried to make them beautiful so people use them in blogs, articles, and generate traffic for us.

Thank You

How are people sharing these plots? A single png (or such) would be easier for me to post. Are there other methods?

Walter

Marco - using latest revision is also misleading and in some cases downright dangerous if the user doesn’t understand what he/she is looking at.
Steve

There’s no way to create an image at the moment.

I used the Snipping Tool in windows and saved the image on my computer.

Although it’s not yet disclosed in any way, revised data currently uses the end date for PIT,
so if you would like to see historical PIT, you’ll have to change the end date using the Date Range popover.


Aaron - that will be even more confusing. If nothing else is going to be done, please include (Most Recent Revision) in the series title.

Also, historical PIT needs to account for the reporting delay. In other words, if June data is reported on July 15th, it is not much good as historical PIT to post a date of June…

Steve

I’ve added a transformation (called PIT) to allow a point-in-time series to be plotted with a daily observation date, which, based on everyone’s comments, I believe is the desired behavior. Once this update is released, this new transformation will be chosen by default when a point-in-time series is added. Thanks for your input.

Aaron - thank you for listening! And the default is PIT which is great. Now you can see the problem with using the revised data. i.e. the indicator can’t deliver what it promises.
Steve


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I can’t seem to use the Multi Chart tool and add a series plot. When I select “Series”, a search term is requested but regardless of what I enter, nothing is found. Is there a trick I don’t know, or…?

Very nice! would be great if it could be used with sims. -Debbie