Chart markers for use in finance, standardised

In these pages 1⅓ months ago somebody reported on a book on finance that I’d written. Which caused me to discover Hacker News — slow, but got there eventually. Please allow me to bring a gift: a free (proper free, not fake-free freemium) ‘standard’ that I think should be widely used.

Charts in financial markets are a mess: $ or € or £ or ¥ or 元 or ₩ or ₹ might be represented by different symbols on different charts. Indeed, sometimes different symbols on charts created by the same author and appearing on the same page. A consistent set of markers would allow readers to focus more on the meaning of the data, and less on the distraction of attempting to decode the markers.

I have, with great artistic and technical care, created such a standard, open source, https://github.com/jdaw1/chart_markers/ and released under the Boost licence.

The best page to start at might be

https://github.com/jdaw1/chart_markers/blob/main/Documentation/ChartMarkers_Gallery.md except that GitHub’s web server is sometimes reluctant to serve the thousand SVG images on a single page, so there is also an HTML translation at

http://www.jdawiseman.com/papers/Chart_Markers/ChartMarkers_Gallery.html

I think it’s a great standard for financial firms and press to use. If you and you alone use it, then you would be consistent for your readers: a good thing. If others also use it, it would be even easier for your readers: even better.

Several questions:

• It needs promotion and encouragement. How should this be done (issue 2)?

• If it becomes a success, it would need governance arrangements (issue 4).

• Good suggestions for improvements welcome — see Grumbles page first.

https://github.com/jdaw1/chart_markers/blob/main/Documentation/ChartMarkers_Grumbles.md