fox@fury
Analyst Sensationalism
Thursday, Apr 11, 2002 @ 2:36pm
Another example of sensationalism:

Last 5 years of YahooIn no fewer than three articles I read about Yahoo today, they had some version of the graph on the right in the article.

That graph shows yahoo stock over the last five years, and is only shown because it looks pretty 'ooh! look at that!'

Last 12 months of YahooOn the other hand, a graph of the last 12 months tells a different story, of a stock that dropped 50% in value and has fought its way back up.

Last 5 days of YahooNow take a look at the graph for the last five days of Yahoo trading. This is the one that fits the story, talking about the earnings release and subsequent dive.

This is a particularly good example of how looking at the same stock at three different levels of granularity gives three completely different stories to support whatever point you'd like to make.

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Hi, I'm Kevin Fox.
I've been blogging at Fury.com since 1998.
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As a user experience designer for Google, I led the design of Gmail 1.0, Google Calendar 1.0, and Google Reader 2.0.

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