Multiplier Chart

2018년 3월 9일

I am proposing an alternative to the percent change.
An alternative that is symmetrical to both positive and negative change, unlike percentage change.
The simple idea is to have a positive number if the reference value (called val in the script) is lower than the stock value and needs to be multiplied;
a negative number instead if the reference number is higher than the stock value, so the reference value needs to be divided.
Multiplying all by 100 to give clearer and more readable results, the Multiplier would have a huge gap between +100 and -100, because a stock multiplied by 1 or divided by 1 are the same thing.
So we need to compromise and move all positive numbers down by 100 and all negative numbers up by 100. This actually gives a similar result to percentage change, and it is actually identical in the positive range.
The fundamental difference lies on the negative range, which is completely symmetrical. So if a stock goes up 100 points one day (doubles), and the next it goes down another 100 points (halves), at the end of the second day the stock has the same value as it had at the beginning of the first day! On percentage change it would be +100% the first day and -50% the second.
We mustn't undervalue the human tendency to compare a 1% change to a -1% change, but they do not mean the same even if they seem to indicate so.
A clear example of this can be found on CMC 0.60% -3.56% -3.56% (CoinMarketCap), in which each day are shown the best and worst performing coins of the day. So you might see a +900% there in the top performing, but you'll never see a -900%, because percentage change cannot go further than -100%. It is a fundamentally asymmetric scale that can confuse people a lot especially in those fast moving new markets.ù
I am welcome to feedback and all kinds of opinions and critics.

Some interesting things to note: you can use it as a percentage change indicator or as a different perspective to a stock chart. In fact, it lets you see how big of a difference it made buying coins when they were very cheap, because when they are cheap a difference of what it might seem nothing is amplified by all the gains that the stock/coin made after. So, looking at coins charts using this indicator shows how "not flat" were the early days, which in a normal chart are flattened to 0.