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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;-jeffB, post: 1052729, member: 27832&quot;]I&#039;m sorry for the tone of my initial response; rereading it, it sounds kind of hostile, and I didn&#039;t mean it that way.</p><p><br /></p><p>I&#039;m talking about the Y-axis of the charts. They&#039;re &quot;normalized&quot; so that the lowest value is close to the bottom, and the highest is close to the top. The problem is that this exaggerates the degree of change in the third chart (and, to a lesser extent, the second chart).</p><p><br /></p><p>Glancing at the first three charts, they appear to show roughly comparable change. You have to read the Y-axis labels to understand that the first represents a more-than-fourfold increase, the second a not-quite-threefold increase, and the third a mere 1.5x. Normalizing them together, so that each Y-axis starts at 0 and each curve starts at the same height on the chart, would make the relative performance obvious at a glance -- the first one would still soar, while the third would show a fairly weak rise.</p><p><br /></p><p>For the second set of charts, each curve starts out very close to 0 -- on the last chart, it looks like it starts <i>at</i> zero, which of course would make no sense. I can sort of see, and sort of guess, that the bullion chart starts at $35/oz. It looks like the generic gold chart starts at $1000, and I can guess that the MS chart does the same. If that&#039;s true, then the first chart represents a 40-fold increase, the second a 30-fold increase, and the third a 110-fold increase! Again, though, the graphs are <i>scaled</i> in a way that tends to conceal, rather than emphasize, these differences.</p><p><br /></p><p>Sorry -- I don&#039;t mean to pick nits, but visual perception is a big interest of mine, and sometimes I can&#039;t help myself.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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