Ensuring the Evidence Is Evident

© Can Stock Photo Inc.
© Can Stock Photo Inc.

As I’ve covered in past posts, it takes years of painstaking academic inquiry to gather the right data and perform the right analyses to support your evidence-based investment strategy. Then, there’s step two: Effectively communicating what you’re doing to everyday investors. As fond as I am of the written word, data visualization – those tables, charts and graphs that accompany your prose – is also essential to ensuring that investors internalize the “what” as well as the all-important “why” that will help them stay the course in turbulent times.

Data visualization is for sharing data in ways that our dominant sense — sight — can readily interpret. Or, as Edward Tufte, an early leader in data visualization, says, data visualization occurs when “clear and precise seeing becomes as one with clear and precise thinking.”

A few years ago, to learn more about data visualization, I attended a Visual Business Intelligence workshop offered by Stephen Few of Perceptual Edge. Few, an author and expert in applied data visualization, cuts to the essence of effective delivery with a three-step process:

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