The Beauty of Numbers
The fund management industry controls assets worth around $90 trillion worldwide. Deciding how to allocate this money is the task of a global industry that employs more than 50,000 people in the UK alone. Asset managers pride themselves on their ability to analyse their universe of potential investments, and for many it is this methodology or sector knowledge that separates them from the competition and secures their clients.
To communicate an investment strategy, fund managers use all manner of graphs and tables to illustrate performance and highlight the potential of their product but as Monday night’s edition of Newsnight (starting at 26 minutes) highlighted, our ability to represent complicated information is changing.
Presenter David Sillito uses examples such as the charismatic Hans Rosling’s lecture on population and life expectancy to illustrate the compelling nature of modern graphics.
The basic premise of the Newsnight feature is that as the quality and beauty of a presentation increases, so too does our likelihood to pay attention and retain the information.
There is clearly an opportunity for asset managers to use these kinds of graphics with clients and prospects, but also potentially with the media. The websites that serve the investment community have become more visually compelling, I’m thinking in particular of the Financial Times site and innovations such as Alphaville’s Tags graphic for example.
As sites like Citywire add new forms of content such as video, the media is working in partnership with fund managers to generate material. It is not hard to imagine a situation whereby fund mangers with graphics that shed new light on an investment trend could collaborate with media outlets to place their information and at the same time highlight their expertise in important media.
A few illustrations
The video graphic below shows the drop off in the number of flights during the peak of the volcanic ash chaos, but it could just as easily represent investment inflows to major financial markets.
Wheredoesmymoneygo.org looks at how the government is spending our taxes. A fixed income manager could produce something similar to highlight their beliefs about government spending policies and the outlook for the government’s bonds. An interactive version of the graphic below can be found on the website here.
For more on the potential of graphics see the wonderful – http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/ – site.
