Design Study to Visualize Stock Market Bubble Formations and Bursts

The stock market is a very complex and continuously changing environment in which many varying factors shape its growth and decline. Studying interesting trends and analyzing the intricate movements of the market, while ignoring distracting and uninteresting patterns has the potential to save large amounts of money for individuals as well as corporations and governments. This thesis describes research that was conducted with the goal to visualize stock market data in such a way that it is able to show how behavior and movement of various market entities affects the condition of the market as a whole. Different visualizations have been proposed, some that improve on existing traditional methods used by the Finance community and others that are novel in their layout and representation of data and interactions. The proposed design, by the use of interactive multiple coordinated views showing overviews and details of the stock market data using animated bubble charts and statistics, aims to enable the user to visualize market conditions that lead to the formation of a bubble in the market, how they lead to a crash and how the market corrects itself after such a crash.