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Skulltown_Jelly t1_izgdzp4 wrote

Reply to comment by spiral8888 in [OC] How to spot misleading charts? I would like to hear your opinion on the subject, also any tips design-wise? by dark_o3

That's not the only situation. Trend lines are graphs that are used to show...well.. the trends, and the absolute quantities are not as important in many cases.

Stock prices from a certain year are a good example. It's not that it doesn't have meaning, the price of the stock is valuable information, it's just not as important as the trend and depending on the amounts it could make the trend hard to read

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spiral8888 t1_izi3wng wrote

Two things. First, the stock prices are a bit like temperature in a sense that the absolute value of the share price has very little meaning. The share price of $10/share doesn't really tell you anything. It only tells you something in relation to the past.

Second, the relative change of the share price does matter. So, 50% drop in price is a different thing than a 1% drop. If you suppress the zero, they look the same on the graph.

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