Posts tagged as:

misreading misleading charts

Misreading misleading charts: Alaska edition

August 4, 2011

There's a headline making the rounds this morning that caught my eye because it seemed preposterous: "Apple Stock Helping the Alaska Permanent Fund More than Oil." It's everywhere, but the original instigator seems to be this USA Today article. It looks like nobody bothered to read (or understand) the Fund's actual returns. First of all, the Alaska [...]

0 comments Read the whole post →

Misreading misleading charts: rally edition

November 4, 2010

From the "question everything" file, an excellent example of why you should never trust anything without verifying it yourself: a number of conservative mailing lists are forwarding the following image comparing the size of Glen Beck's rally to Jon Stewart's: Note the circles at the bottom, which purport to show the areas involved. The first [...]

0 comments Read the whole post →

Misreading misleading charts: entrepreneur edition

June 18, 2009

Paul Kedrosky writes about a study on the rate of entrepreneurship among various age groups, which includes the following piece of junk (ch)art: Why is this chart 3D? It contains information in only two spatial dimensions (time and rate), with a third dimension coded by color. To make the chart itself is a purely superfluous [...]

0 comments Read the whole post →

Misreading misleading charts: VIX edition

June 16, 2009

Get your tin foil hats back out! Zero Hedge can't seem to keep their manipulation theories under control (I addressed one here in one of TGR's most popular posts) and today's example is to egregious to pass up. In this post, Zero Hedge reviews ground breaking "research" from Innovative Quant Solutions "on the very relevant topic [...]

1 comment Read the whole post →

Misreading misleading charts

March 26, 2009

This chart caught my eye because it is potentially misleading (click to zoom).  It shows the year-over-year change in hotel occupancy rates, from 2001-2009. My first impression, on viewing the small chart, was that we haven't hit the low of the last recession.  But (as the box very clearly points out) the low of the [...]

1 comment Read the whole post →