Labs / Idea: Irregular series as trees of shards
Shards, not candles.
A candlestick summarises a fixed slot of time. A shard summarises a move: it starts and ends at turning points, keeps when the high and the low happened, and holds smaller shards inside it. Market Shards draws every S&P 500 company this way, and finds the same shape in other companies.
Synthetic data: a seeded random walk of 120 trading days, for illustration. Click a shard to select it.
Selected shard
Nearest shapes
Shapes are compared inside their own boxes, so price level and time span drop out. Here the matches come from the same synthetic series; in the lab they come from every other company in the S&P 500.
Why a new chart primitive
What a shard keeps that a candle throws away
| Candlestick | Shard | |
|---|---|---|
| Time span | A fixed slot: a day, an hour, a week | The move itself, from one turning point to the next |
| Prices | Open, high, low, close | Open, high, low, close, and when the high and the low happened |
| Scale | One size per chart; change it and redraw | Nested: every shard holds smaller shards, down to single bars |
| Irregular data | Needs a regular grid of slots | Built from samples wherever they fall |
| Comparison | By price and date | By shape in its own box, across companies and time scales |
In the lab
Every S&P 500 company, in shards
- Pick a company by name, ticker or sector
- Its chart and its tree of shards side by side, linked both ways
- Click a shard to see the nearest shapes in other companies, each in its own box
- Zoom from ten years down to single days
Licensed daily prices, adjusted for splits and dividends, shown as charts only.