Observations, Calculations, and Values
This may be the first time that I’ve seen a “powerpoint” deck put out by a major consulting firm in an interactive format.
Although the presentation is only interactive in terms of navigation, not calculations or data presentation, the mark of a McKinsey presentation is clearly evident: very dense slides with lots of detailed [...]
A couple of years ago, I became curious about saving money with compact fluorescent light bulbs. Were all the claims I had heard true? I did the math, based on pricing and data that I found from a specialty retailer bulbs.com, and discovered that if you can accept the risk of having mercury [...]
In Fareed Zakaria’s wonderfully written book, “The Post American World“, one of the concepts that he describes as he looks around the world is what he calls “The Rise of the Rest”. The above chart demonstrates this concept nicely. It shows how the US banking sector dominated half of the top 20 banks [...]
Amazon’s enterprise hosting & storage services have become a meaningful and useful tool for rolling out scalable web services. To make their pricing model even more transparent, Amazon offers up a very 1997 feeling calculator, which can be found here. I suppose it kinda gets the point across. Sorta. Except that you have to push [...]
In the electrical power industry, investments in new power plants have huge upfront costs as well as significant ongoing operational expenses over the life of the facility. To compare the cost of power across projects, people in the industry often talk of the “Levelized Cost of Energy” or LCOE for short. The idea [...]
The Wall Street Journal featured this nice interactive map of Madoff’s web.
I’ve seen various attempts at the now familiar “Map of the Market”, which is a treemap that shows the performance of the larger stocks in the investing universe.
The original comes from the Wall Street Journal and Smart Money, but it hasn’t changed much since it was developed many years ago.
The picture above, however, represents a [...]
When I was a teenager, my father’s stockbroker tried to explain puts and calls to me. He introduced me to the hockey stick diagrams that many investors use to visualize these types of strategies. It took a few more years for me to get comfortable understanding how puts and calls work. [...]
Line graphs can be so last century. Here’s a chart only a true data junkie could love. The print version of the paper presented the below graphic together with a more traditional line graph. In truth, the line graphs in the paper are much easier to read, but the interactivity of the [...]
Here is a nice little calculator that the New York Times put together to consider rent vs. buy decisions of a primary residence.
I’ve not gone through the calculations in a detailed way, but there are two things I like about the model. The first is that there are panels to specify additional [...]