A large number of investors are now trading in the securities markets. According to Business Week™, there are currently about 100 million individual investors in the United States alone. These individuals invest in the securities markets either on their own as individual traders or through a variety of brokers. According to The Tower Group™, there are currently about 675,000 registered brokers in the United States alone. These brokers work at about 5,500 different firms which staff almost 90,000 branch offices throughout the United States.
An enormous amount of financial information is now available to professional and individual investors, and the volume and availability of this information is growing at an explosive rate. By way of example, note the recent explosion of online financial information. Price quotes for almost any financial instrument (e.g., stocks, bonds, etc.) are now readily available from a wide variety of online sites. Furthermore, Morningstar™ now offers its mutual fund ratings online, and Yahoo™ allows an investor to review SEC filings, look at analysts' stock recommendations, and learn how other markets around the world are performing. At the same time, traditional print publications such as The Wall Street Journal™ and The Financial Times™ are making more and more financial information available to the reader, and traditional broadcast media such as television and cable television are now providing 24-hour business programming.
The widespread availability of this enormous volume of often conflicting and confusing information often inhibits the ability of investors to comprehend and utilize the information efficiently. As a result, their confidence in what that information means frequently decreases almost in proportion to the rate at which the quantity of information grows. The sheer quantity of data obscures the correlation and interdependencies inherent in that data. For individual investors, the volume of data can be daunting. Even experienced traders, looking at dynamically changing assortments of numbers, tables, charts and graphs, are sometimes overwhelmed. This often leads to increased stress, eye fatigue and frustration. Under these conditions, even seasoned professionals sometimes fail to make critical decisions well and frequently resort to the oldest—and possibly the most unreliable—criteria of all, the “gut instinct”.
Thus there is a significant need for a more effective tool for mining the wealth of financial data currently available, extracting significant information therefrom, and presenting the same to the investor in a visually compelling manner.