I have started tracking stocks on Yahoo. Not that I am investing, but I find that looking a certain set of stocks helps explain the news. Specifically, I have a list that has two main types of stocks: Tech and Oil. Here is the list:
| VMW | 10:29AM ET | 46.76 |  0.38 |
0.82% |
251,554 | 17.93B | Chart, Messages, Key Stats, More | |
| YHOO | 10:34AM ET | 28.33 | 0.24 |
0.85% |
4,203,632 | 37.88B | Chart, Messages, Key Stats, More | |
| AAPL | 10:34AM ET | 143.57 | 3.32 |
2.37% |
8,182,315 | 126.18B | Chart, Messages, Key Stats, More | |
| JAVA | 10:34AM ET | 16.06 | 0.15 |
0.94% |
1,501,868 | 14.46B | Chart, Messages, Key Stats, More | |
| DELL | 10:34AM ET | 19.84 | 0.37 |
1.91% |
3,191,453 | 43.34B | Chart, Messages, Key Stats, More | |
| EMC | 10:29AM ET | 14.40 | 0.07 |
0.52% |
4,446,405 | 30.26B | Chart, Messages, Key Stats, More | |
| IBM | 10:29AM ET | 114.99 |  0.53 |
0.46% |
1,447,515 | 159.18B | Chart, Messages, Key Stats, More | |
| ORCL | 10:34AM ET | 19.79 | 0.36 |
1.85% |
11,308,559 | 101.65B | Chart, Messages, Key Stats, More | |
| MSFT | 10:34AM ET | 28.30 | 0.25 |
0.89% |
10,469,087 | 263.39B | Chart, Messages, Key Stats, More | |
| GOOG | 10:33AM ET | 449.14 | 5.06 |
1.14% |
1,378,627 | 140.75B | Chart, Messages, Key Stats, More | |
| GGP | 10:28AM ET | 38.58 | 0.13 |
0.34% |
727,075 | 9.41B | Chart, Messages, Key Stats, More | |
| RHT | 10:29AM ET | 18.31 | 0.78 |
4.45% |
1,322,182 | 3.56B | Chart, Messages, Key Stats, More | |
| NOVL | 10:34AM ET | 6.24 | 0.07 |
1.13% |
304,018 | 2.20B | Chart, Messages, Key Stats, More | |
| BP | 10:29AM ET | 60.73 | 0.07 |
0.12% |
1,307,600 | 191.53B | Chart, Messages, Key Stats, More | |
| HAL | 10:29AM ET | 39.29 | 0.19 |
0.49% |
2,895,156 | 34.58B | Chart, Messages, Key Stats, More | |
| SLB | 10:29AM ET | 86.40 | 1.02 |
1.19% |
1,678,732 | 103.48B | Chart, Messages, Key Stats, More | |
| KBR | 10:28AM ET | 28.97 | 0.59 |
2.08% |
140,700 | 4.92B | Chart, Messages, Key Stats, More | |
| XOM | 10:29AM ET | 86.95 | 0.75 |
0.87% |
3,768,280 | 465.18B | Chart, Messages, Key Stats, More | |
| MT | 10:29AM ET | 79.93 | 1.08 |
1.37% |
1,044,700 | 113.63B | Chart, Messages, Key Stats, More | |
| COP | 10:29AM ET | 76.21 | 0.48 |
0.63% |
2,057,477 | 119.00B | Chart, Messages, Key Stats, More |
A couple of steel stocks are mixed in at the end, and KBR is Kellog Brown and Root, the company that Haliburton spun off and that fed me while I was deployed to Haiti all those years ago. GGP is General Growth Properties, and represents both real estate and the retail market. What I look at first and foremost is the overall color. I don’t care about any particular stock so much as if the tech sector is all red but the oil sector is green, or if the whole thing is one or the other.
I realize that all of this summary info is available on the headlines of the Wall Street Journal or on the finance pages, but there is something about being able to draw your own conclusion from the presentation of the data that makes it easier to comprehend quickly.
Another piece of information that leaps out from this display is if a given stock is behaving differently from its market. There is a difference between Oracle going up 5% on a tech green day and a tech red day.
Tufte would be proud .