The Art of Shares: visualising stock market volatility

IG presents ‘The Art of Shares’, an interactive tool that enables you to create beautiful 3D sculptures out of share price data. You can make art out of some of the most interesting companies across the London Stock Exchange, Euronext and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).

You can choose to create your own sculpture or take a deeper look at one of the stock market’s most infamous stories to help you to visualise the impact of political, technological and cultural events on share prices.

Creating your own share price sculpture

To generate your own share price sculpture, all you need to do is search a company’s name and the Art of Shares tool will build a piece of art using historical data from the company’s initial public offering (IPO) right through to the present day.

This data is turned into an interactive sculpture that will help you visualise the successes and failures of the company, shown in part by two arcs that represent the stock price high and low.

For example, the arc in the image below indicate Apple’s share price high of $227 in August 2018.

Explore infamous stock market stories

We have also delved into 13 of the stock markets' most infamous stories, including:

The 15-minute flash crash

On 6 May 2010, the Dow Jones lost 9% of its value over the course of 15 minutes, representing around $1 trillion worth of stocks. This is shown by the thin, sharp protrusion towards the top of the sculpture below. The cause of this momentous drop was allegedly an overly effective ‘spoofing robot’, which was designed to create fake sell orders to drive down the price of Proctor & Gamble’s E-Mini futures.

Cisco (CSCO) and the dot-com bubble

Cisco (CSCO) was once the most valuable company in the world. This is because the multinational technology company received a large amount of investment during the dot-com bubble between 1999 to 2001.

In March 2000, shares of CSCO peaked at $77.83, making it the most valuable company in the world at the time. But in the months that followed, the bubble burst and investors began dumping shares of CSCO – by March of the following year, its shares were trading at $15.81. The tech giant may have played a part in its own downfall, as CSCO issued huge sell orders on the stock market that caused further panic.