Freakalytics

Selecting a “safe” stock with a solid dividend is quite popular in the current economic climate. The traditional “safe” investments are paying extremely low interest rates while many American companies are growing revenues while paying out strong dividend yields (4% and higher) that exceed those of government bonds. In late December, I selected a set of stocks with solid financial strength ratings, positive revenue growth in the past year, dividends of 4% or more and lower than average stock price volatility (also called the beta of a stock.)  
 
 

After some data cleanup, I assembled this into a dashboard for quick review and exploration. This dashboard allows you to select higher yields, higher revenue growth or lower levels of volatility. By clicking on an individual stock, you are taken to MSN Money web site (below initial dashboard) for their current “StockScouter” rating.

Read more

We are always excited to see new people using visual analytics with data in the public interest. After seeing some great poverty analysis work from the Utah Department of Workforce Services, we wanted to share some ideas that might provide inspiration to them.

Here is the original chart

Read more

GigaOM’s recent article on the growth of the iPad and overall tablet-related OS market inspired me to take their forecasts one step further- actual profit estimates through 2015 per major player in the article.
 
My forecasts are indeed rough, but attribute higher and lower profits to the various vendors based on the nature of their product, likely price point and direct or indirect control they will have over the actual distribution of their platform. For example, Android is expected to be heavily partnered for their distribution (the upcoming Kindle is just one example), this implies lower profit per unit. Meanwhile, Apple with their early market lead and total control over the tablet sales implies higher profit per unit sold. Regardless, these are rough estimates, but fascinating to consider. Most incredible

Read more

While working hard on a busy weekend, I decided to take a “break” from our upcoming book and client work to spend 30 minutes to help and surprise a newer user of Tableau- social media expert Justin Flitter of New Zealand. He is new to Tableau Public and had started off with a look at some social media metrics by country. Here is a snapshot of his initial work:
 

 
 
 
After reviewing his initial workbook

Read more

I was very interested to read the survey results from MIT about data access challenges facing business analysts. The article states that “The New Intelligent Enterprise… will allow you to do some immediate benchmarking – and see how your organization is doing in relation to your peers.” While I am certain the data from this survey can indeed be useful in meeting their objective, I am also certain that their initial chart selection makes this difficult to easily see and understand.

In an effort to demonstrate how they can make their upcoming report much more informative

Read more