Data Manipulation Also Happens In The Insurance World
The concept of data manipulation hit home with me over this last week. I found an old college textbook with its associated notes – yes written in ink on paper – with a comment that the college professor made during one of his lectures.
We were covering data manipulation by simply using different graph versions. It’s the Y-Axis stupid – came directly from an example in the textbook.
Example
We are living in an election year where many different versions of the same data can look completely different. No political commentary and I will not give out any insurance world examples. I saw a version of stock data manipulation last night warning that a certain company’s stock had crashed to a much lower level. The crash was a 5% loss.
I saw this on Bloomberg TV last night in one of its recap shows. If I invested in the stock and lost 5%, that percentage would look huge.
Corporation’s Stock Price
A graph that shows the classic X-and-Y axis changes can be seen with the NVIDIA stock. One addition comes from the X-axis changes (time) and Y-axis (price). The stock experienced significant gains over the last year.
In other words, there was a one-week stock correction that would seem significant. So, this shows how a crash can be overblown. Now, back to the Y-axis, see how the charts have a different scale in comparison. Yes, the numbers were not due to data manipulation. Current financial news outlets are still discussing the “crash.” – really?
Bottom Line on Data Manipulation
The easiest way to detect X-and-Y data manipulation is to look at the scale. NVIDIA or Google Stock Analysis never attempted to manipulate any data. I shortened the time frames (X-axis) and price (Y-axis) to provide two charts for comparison. A website that provides free financial data can be found here – my favorite.
Please note this does not serve as investment advice.
