This week’s issue includes our second annual HIGHLY ANTICIPATED BBW50 TOP PERFORMING COMPANIES.
Since this data is unique to Bloomberg I thought I’d explain some of the process that went into visualizing the data.
The BBW 50 is an evaluation of the S&P 500 companies based on four factors:
- 1-year risk-adjusted returns as of Dec. 31, 2011
- 5-year risk-adjusted returns as of Dec. 31, 2011
- Consensus analyst recommendations
- Projected earnings growth
The math that went into deciding these scores was computed by Bloomberg Rankings so I can’t get into much detail about that but each category has a potential score of 500 with a total potential perfect score of 2,000.
In a rare gatefold, we dedicated four pages to visualizing these four factors. Because the total scores for each of these 50 companies doesn’t vary much from company to company it doesn’t create a very dynamic chart to look at; however, the individual factors that make up the totals swing up and down per company. Using a simple stacked bar chart you’re able to individually compare one company to the next.
Thank you excel.
In addition to annotations for a few select companies this feature includes brief interviews with CEOs from Chipotle, BiogenIdec, and Coca-Cola so it doesn’t just become some big data dump.
This left us with the back page. Though I had blown our ratings-data-wad on the gatefold I still had a spreadsheet full of performance based numbers. Along with editors John Tozzi and David Rocks, we tried a variation of a few indicators.
At first it seemed obvious to use 1-year and 5-year risk-adjusted returns… and that’s because it is obvious. Above, 5-year (red) was always bigger than 1-year (blue) which is terribly boring and more importantly, priceline.com (our number 2 ranked company) dwarfed our top rated company, Mastercard. That would be a terrible way to conclude the feature.
Once we got sales figures from the past year it was clear that this would make an interesting metric to test our ranking. You start to see the BBW50 rankings reward consistent growth over sheer size.
I love excel. And contrary to these screenshots, I do use WindowsExcel thanks to the pied piper of Gateway computers, Evan Applegate. Unfortunately, not even WindowsExcel can handle detailed scatter plots. Sure, it can show me a pattern or outliers, as it does above. But I have NO IDEA which company is which. And, until I learn R or can write in action script I am left with googling “scatter plot excel labels” and low and behold, a script exists to do such a trick.
Made by Marthias Brandewinder it magically outputs everything with labels and even lets me code company by sector.
As an added bonus I layered on predicted percent changes in earnings per share for each company. Though, the variation here isn’t dramatic you immediately get a sense for which company has the best potential to boost profits. I’m looking at you, Cabot Oil & Gas.
A skew here, a gradient there, and suddenly you have a sexy S&P 500 centerfold.
[...] Hän blogaa välillä siitä, miten lehden kuuluisat infografiikat syntyvät: verolobbausta ja 50 kovinta firmaa. Noita katsomalla ei tietenkään opi tekemään infografiikkaa, mutta ehkä siitä saa pienen [...]