U.S. stock markets have taken a beating this past week fueled by China markets. Take a look at how China and US markets fared this year and learn how to create these chart using Power BI Desktop.
The three line charts in the following image represent weekly data Shanghai Composite Index (China), Dow Jones Industrial Average, and S&P 500 Index respectively.
Related: Track S&P 500 Index Using Power BI
In the first line chart, you can see that China markets have been volatile this year with big up and downswings. Unsurprisingly, second and third charts – both representing US markets – closely follow the same pattern. And US seemed to have resisted drops in China markets for the most part although there were slight declines every time China fell. However, the drop in Chinese stocks on Monday triggered huge decline in US stocks.
Creating these charts is easy. Once you do download the data anywhere from a number of available sources, you simply create a line chart. Since I wanted to focus on China, I chose to use the same color for DJI and GSPC, and use a different color for Shanghai to highlight it.
Another way to look at this is to see percentage change and display all three values on the same chart as shown below.
To create this you calculate the percent change (here’s an example for that) and again use a line chart.
Summary
In this example, you saw how you can use Power BI Desktop to create a simple line chart to visualize stock market performance. You can use similar charts in a variety of scenarios in your business. These charts are simple yet powerful in telling a data story.
Disclosure: This post is neither investment commentary nor advice. I’m not an investment professional. Information provided here is only for educational purposes. Data is from Yahoo! Finance.
