El Dr. Jeremy Walton, Consultor Senior de Visualización de la compañía Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG), organización mundial dedicada al desarrollo de componentes software para cálculo numérico, estadístico y visualización 3D utilizado por muchas firmas financieras mundiales, publica en Financial Engineering News la segunda parte del artículo Get the Picture: Visualizing Financial Data. Este artículo presenta la solución a las limitaciones para la visualización de datos que presentan aplicaciones como Microsoft Excel: el uso de aplicaciones especializadas en la visualización como es el caso de IRIS Explorer. El artículo comienza así:

In the first article in this series, we saw how visualization can help with the understanding of financial data, and looked at some examples produced using Microsoft® Excel’s charting facility. We saw that, although Excel is good for the plotting of one variable as a function of another – for example, share price vs. time – it can run into difficulties with more complex datasets which depend on more than one variable – for example option volatility. In particular, we saw that problems arise when the spacing between successive values for variables is irregular, or when there are discontinuities in the data.

To find alternative ways of plotting these more complex datasets, we must turn to other software packages, many of which have their origins elsewhere. The importance of visualization as a tool for understanding has long been recognized in many areas including science and engineering, and it is interesting to see whether packages developed for any of these fields can be used to supplement software currently being used by financial analysts.