Wednesday 24 April 2013

Malaysia Political map Revisited

Hi,

A while back I posted something about the Malaysian Political scene since 1986, and if you are aware about the Malaysian politics, finally the 13th General Election is upon is after such an agonizing wait. This GE could turn out to be a make or break deal for Malaysia especially the opposition party Pakatan Rakyat (PR) or People's Coalition, which also added some unimaginable pressure for Barisan National (BN) or the National Front, to prove their tried and tested governance of 56 years. By the time you are reading this, Malaysia's future could have unfolded as the world watch. Hopefully, you've been watching in delight as democracy is being practiced with intelligence and maturity rather than in anarchy. So crossing fingers, we only hope for the best regardless which party succeeds, we only wish that it is the people who ultimately won.

Since this is a revisit to our dear old Viz, I've upgraded it with some insights on how the Malaysia's poorest living under $5 have been doing since 1986 and also a little look at a survey on what Malaysians generally want change in their government. Also you can see that I've incorporated some cool Tableau V8 features inside.

Its interesting to see that at 2004 our nation's middle and poor class have totaled to more that 10 million, which is about a third of the people of the country, a direct impact of the 1998 financial crisis no doubt. But amazingly, the people trusted the then prime minister Tun Abdullah enough that it translated into a huge win for BN and the number of middle to poor class were lowered in 2008. So hopefully we'd see the same trend in 2013.

So pray for the best, and wish us luck on 5th May 2013. See ya.

-Zan



Sunday 21 April 2013

What If?: I invested on the S&P since the 50's

Hi guys,

Here's another take of the What If? series. Today's entry is trying to figure out, of sorts, the S&P index of the top 500 publicly listed companies in the United States. For the uninitiated (like yours truly), the S&P 500 index is one of the indices that some investment companies offer as a fund, dubbed as "index fund", that you could invest your money in, these funds is bench-marked to the S&P 500 by holding the same share as the index. This index is traded daily thus hold a very large of historical data that goes back to the 1950s.

Now What If? You started to put money on these index funds and continually contribute on a monthly basis. Based on the historical prices of the Index up to the the time of upload, we have generated the Viz below to reflect on the potential of profit, as well as show the behavior of the index for the past 50 plus years. Imagine contributing money since the 80's or 60's or the 50's, how much your wealth would have grown.

The Data below is provided by Yahoo! Finance and generated with Tableau.

Edit: Updated our Viz with Tableau 8, and added some new calculations and controls :)

-Zan

Hover your mouse on the graph to get more info