What do Box Plots and Japanese Candlesticks have in common?
I have a confession to make. When I first came across Box Plots in Data Analytics my first thought was "I've never seen these used in real life". So I kind of discarded them as interesting but unlikely to ever be really useful to me personally.
Yesterday I was working at a hot desk in a local Small Business Incubator facility in my home town while I waited for a Networking function to start. I was working away when a loud and confident gentleman walked in, sat down at the desk next to me, stuck his hand out and introduced himself.
We got to chatting (he was fascinated to learn more about WYWM) and I learned that he was a Stock Broker. I confessed that although I call myself a Data Analyst, I don't know anything about stock trading and would he mind showing me a bit about what he does. I explained that I was always looking for opportunities to raise awareness for our Data Analytics students on where Data is used in business.
Quite happily, he turned his screen around and there were what he called his Japanese Candlesticks. A great big long line of Green and Red Box plots in time sequence tracking the trading history of a publicly listed company (complete with outliers). I got side tracked and forgot to ask him what Software his company used.
My google query "best stock trading analysis dashboard" gave me "About 2000000 results in 0.46 seconds". I'm not making an endorsement (I already told you I don't have a clue about this stuff) but one product that seems to come up regularly is some software called Trading View. Their webpage has some really cool visualisations and you can book in for a free trial if you want to give it a try. There are Box Plots everywhere.