Sighted in the Long Room — one almighty visualisation of UBS analysts:
(Click to enlarge)
The network diagram was created earlier this year by Toby Segaran, an all-round techno wonk. It’s a continuation of a speech he gave at last year’s Web 2.0 Expo — about visualising financial data.
This particular data set is taken from UBS’s quarterly Analyst Transparency Report. These reports list all of the companies/sectors an analyst is responsible for, and their buy/sell/hold recommendations.
And, as a big picture representation of what all the bank’s analysts are getting up to, it’s really quite novel.
The analysts themselves are in square nodes, while the companies’ tickers are in round ones. A green line denotes a buy recommendation, while red is sell, and black is neutral. You can see that people like Jeffrey Palma — UBS’s global equity strategist — sit directly in the middle of the network map, usually in a sea of greenish buys. Sector specialists have their own little nodules, sometimes darkly-shaded.
Great stuff.
Related links:
Finance 2.0 – The Long Room
[Outlook 2010] How will analysts fare? – FT Alphaville
Don’t trust the data – FT Alphaville