Advance Technology and Methods within Finance

Advance Visualization Techniques in Finance July 21, 2006

Precipitated by the recent acknowledgment by an award being given to the company Fractal Edge for its innovative work in financial visualization, and my, timely introduction to a gifted “techno-artist” named W. Bradford Paley, I was compelled by the opportunistic, and appropriate, reason to address the ever challenging duty of delivering meaningful advancements in the field of financial visualization. I must admit that before I met Bradford that I was only aware that I understood pictures more than a long string of lexical and syntactically correct text describing an abstract concept. But his passion and intuitive style of presenting visualization techniques revitalized my spirit, and my belief that the “Holo-Deck” was not “crap”. That there is indeed much more available when you put your mind, or cerebral cortex, to it; which he does to our gratitude!

Many cognitive studies have demonstrated convincingly that human cognition relies more heavily on visual than numeric stimuli. People absorb and process large amounts of visual data using the visual cortex, a specialized area of the brain, every second. Despite this fact, the most common basis for presenting and analyzing quantitative research in financial engineering is still numerical, e.g., spreadsheets and tables. Some have argued that visualization is less achievable for financial applications because of the high dimensionality of the problems. These arguments have been refuted dramatically in other highly quantitative disciplines such as fluid dynamics, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, molecular biology, and meteorology, in which visualization has come to play a central role in both basic research and industry applications. 

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