VizWorld.com

India’s Prime Focus contributed only about 10% of the effects seen in Avatar, but that alone was enough to drive their stock up an impressive 10% when the success of the film hit the news.

The film, one of the most expensive ever made with a reported budget of at least $300 million, paints an eco-friendly tale set in a mineral-rich alien land characterised by visual flourishes such as dragon-like birds, glowing trees, floating mountains and blue-bodied people.

“We contributed about 10 percent of the visual effects for Avatar,” Namit Malhotra, who founded Prime Focus as a 21-year-old more than a decade ago, told Reuters by telephone.

via Avatar effects boost Prime Focus stock.

Graphics avatar, prime focus, stockmarket

The Chicago Board Options Exchange has integrated Aqumin‘s AlphaVision Enterprise Intelligence Technology into their workflow for data management and analysis.  The software creates 3D landscapes that can be used to better discover irregularities:

“Large proprietary datasets maintained by the CBOE can now easily be ingested into our intuitive, visual 3D landscapes for CBOE’s rapid interpretation of option trading activities across the entire market at once,” said Michael Zeitlin, co-founder and CEO of Aqumin. “CBOE can now ingest hundreds or thousands of data points at one time that have to do with activity in the options market. What CBOE staff are looking for are exceptions, or market irregularities that are not necessarily wrong or illegal but unusual enough to warrant further attention as well as a tool to manage their business better.”

via CBOE Takes 3D View of its Own Market Activity.

Science aqumin, financial, stockmarket

InsideHPC noticed that yesterday’s stock prices show some pretty significant shift in the industry as the death of Larrabee signaled a big win for AMD and NVidia.

So what’s next for the Intel Larrabee division? Intel spokespeople indicated that a future Larrabee product would be used for a software development platform for graphics and high performance computing. What that really means, no one outside Intel really knows. Either way, NVIDIA’s shares closed up narly 13% on Monday evening at $16.09 and AMD closed up 8.4% at $8.52.

Reuters via NVIDIA, AMD Stocks Rally as Intel Larrabee Retreats | insideHPC.com.

Hardware amd, intel, larrabee, nvidia, stockmarket

UniformChaos has build the STOC, Stock Ticker Orbital Comparison, which visualizes the stocks of the S&P500 as planets orbiting around the centerl S&P average.

STOC seeks to allow immediate comparison of hundreds or thousands of stocks, by mapping various stock-specific parameters to easily observable visual outputs, as one is able to immediately identify the largest, or reddest, or quickest item in the group. The data is mapped as follows: volume of trading = planet orbital distance; comparison to S&P 500 = planet speed; percent change from prior close = planet color; market capitalization = planet size; P/E ratio = planet atmosphere width and color; moving average = planet opacity; dividend yield = planet moon size. The large center circle, or sun, reprsents the average of all these numbers to define the general performance of the S&P 500.

You can download the visualization in Windows, Mac, & Linux versions.  See a video of it after the break.

via STOC: NYSE Stock Exchange Planetary System – information aesthetics.

Read more…

Science interactive, stockmarket

Visualization in the finance sector is nothing new, but the extent of it is somewhat shrouded in secrecy.  Each trader has their own secrets and tools, and are somewhat reluctant to share it with others.  Andrew Hart over at Seeking Alpha has a roundup of 5 such tools that track finance and stock data with everything from basic line and bar charts to more complex heatmap visualizations.

Top 5 Options Tools [Free] – Andrew Hart — Seeking Alpha.

Science economic, financial, stockmarket