Stock Market Map is a visual discovery tool. It helps traders in identifying outliers within specific universes of symbols. Maps draw your attention to specific symbols, guiding you toward insights. Symbols can catch one's eye in two ways:
- Tile Size: Larger tiles are easier to see and can draw your attention. Market Cap is a default option, but you can use one of the 50 metrics supported.
- Color Coding: Bright red or green highlight outliers. Blue highlight the "normal".
Historically, tile maps like that used Market Cap for a tile size and Daily Change% for a tile color. On TrendSpider, you can pick one of 42 fundamental metrics, plus 15 performance metrics (like 30 days price change) for both tile size and tile color.
Setting up a map
Every stock tile map uses three parameters:
- List of symbols. Defines which symbols you want to see on the map. Pick one of 700 pre-made lists (index lists like S&P 500, economy sector lists, economy industry lists and such). You can also use your custom watch list or a scanner as a source of symbols for a Stock Market map.
- Tile size metric.
- Tile color metric.
For both tile size and tile color, "bigger" or "brighter" means "better" and not necessarily "mathematically greater". For example, if your Tile Size is defined by Revenue, then the biggest tiles will belong to symbols with Revenue being mathematically much greater than the others in a given universe. That's because for Revenue, the meaning is "the more, the better". However, if you pick P/E ratio for your tile color, then smaller positive values will be green, and bigger positive values will be red (see below), because "the bigger the better" does not apply to P/E ratio.
Meaning of colors
Tiles can be colored red, green, blue, and gray, depending on what metric you're using. Exceptionally high or low changes will be bright green or red. Below are the color descriptions::
- Blue. For all the fundamental metrics, symbols that have their value of this metric being typical for a given universe of symbols, are blue. "Typical" means "falling between the 45th and 55th percentiles". Think of it as "somewhere around the median value". Performance metrics (like Change%) never generate blue tiles.
- Green: for performance metrics, everything greater than zero will be green. For fundamental metrics, everything better the median (see p.1 Blue) will be green. The meaning of what's "better" depends on the metric you use. For example, for revenue, it's "the more the better." For P/E Ratio, it's "the less the better, as long as it's positive."
- Red: the opposite of green
- Gray: in some cases, when we can't tell whether the value is good or bad, the color is gray. For example, negative P/E ratios are gray.
Stock tile maps can use any of the universes we support (i.e., Nasdaq NMS Composite, S&P 500, etc.). In case the universe is longer than 300 items, the map will only display 300 "best" tiles (according to which metric you select for the Tile Size). However, when computing the median for the purpose of coloring, the entire universe is used.
Limitations of Beta version
There are some known incorrect data points. Also, some symbols can not be used in Stock Maps (including some bigger names like MCD and AMD). We expect to get rid of these limitations soon.