Nasdaq: A Global Electronic Marketplace for Securities Trading

Graphical Representations

Nasdaq is a world-wide electronic marketplace for trading securities headquartered in New York. It began its operations on February 8, 1971. Nasdaq was founded by the National Association of Security Dealers (NASD) with the intention to enable stockholders buy and sell securities on a computerized, speedy and transparent system. Nasdaq is also an index of more three thousand stocks that are listed on the Nasdaq exchange that comprises the world’s leading biotechnology and technology giants such as Amazon, Intel, Oracle, Microsoft, Apple and Google. It is the largest stock exchange company in the world, powering 1 in 10 of the world’s securities transactions. Nasdaq operated in twenty-five markets, five central securities depositories in the US and Europe, and one clearing house (Chen, 2020). Data is collected for Nasdaq for the previous one year begin the Yahoo finance website (Nasdaq composite (^IXIC) historical data -Yahoo finance, n.d.). The purpose is to create scatter plots and histograms as well as to develop descriptive statistics that help to describe the data. The scatter plots describe the relationship between highest and lowest stock price with time, the histograms visualize the distribution of stock volume and adjusted closing price of stock while the descriptive statistics describe the distribution of volume of stock and the adjusted closing price for stock.

The data for time and the highest stock price was arranged in the appropriate column of the excel work book. The scatter plot for the data was inserted from the insert tab of excel where the scatter plot (X, Y) was selected. The highest stock price is in the Y axis since it’s the dependent variable while the time variable is on the X axis since it’s the independent variable (Rumsey, 2015). There is a positive relationship between highest stock price and time.

The data for time and the lowest stock price was arranged in the appropriate column of the excel work book. The scatter plot for the data was inserted from the insert tab of excel where the scatter plot (X, Y) was selected. The lowest stock price is in the Y axis since it’s the dependent variable while the time variable is on the X axis since it’s the independent variable. There is a weak positive relationship between lowest stock price and time.

The first step in creating the histogram was the determination of the number of class intervals, the width of the class intervals and the frequency of each class. The number of class intervals was determined using the  rule (Jackson, 2016). Since  in our case, the appropriate class interval was determined to be eight since . The width of each class was determined as below.

The frequency of each class was determined as shown from the frequency distribution table below.

Lastly, the histogram was created from the data analysis tool Pak histogram function in excel with the array range being the values of adjusted closing stock price and the bin range the upper limit. The x-axis was changed to have class interval in place of the bin range and the gap width for the bars reduced to zero since a histogram has the bars attached to one another.

The steps for creating this histogram are the same as those followed for the previous histogram. However, the values of volumes have been divided by 1000000 to make the range of values more reasonable (Levie, 2012). The width of each class was determined as below.

The frequency of each class was determined as shown from the frequency distribution table below.