Help Needed - Chart Generation

Water Cooler
#1

I have a presentation next week as part of an interview for an analyst position. I’d appreciate some advice or help in this area if any of you would oblige me.

I am presenting on a company in the gaming sector, of which there are about 6-7 key competitors within the markets the firm operates in.

I’m looking to analyse stock performance of the relevant competitors over the past 10 years or so. I have all the stock prices of the firms from this period on an excel sheet.

Many of these firms launched their IPO’s only in the last 3-4 years, and all of them have been launched at scattered intervals within this period, so therefore there are different levels of historical prices I can display in the presentation.

With that in mind, what would be the best method for me to chart the performance of the stocks and also how to display this in a Powerpoint document?

(My Excel skills are good, my powerpoint skills are not).

Many thanks in advance.

#2

Mean-variance scatterplot. Annualized montlhy returns on the y-axis. Annualized monthly Standard deviation on the x-axis. Be sure to use the earliest common date. Dont show one stock from 1999- 2011 on the same chart as one thats 2007-2011, they call have to have the same time series. You could also do a Sharpe ratio bar chart if your audience is 3rd graders.

#3

Thank you. If I were to graph just one particular stock over a 10 year period, is it acceptable practice to use a screenshot of an external provider e.g. Yahoo Finance or Bloomberg rather than generating the graph from raw data? I mean essentially it illustrates the same thing?

#4

I would personally pull the daily price data off yahoo finance and make the graph yourself (takes 2 seconds)

#5

FWIW, I disagree. Using an external provider will look more authoritative and trustworthy. Plus everyone else does it that way.