The Magiscian

One of my hobbies beside GIS is following the Stock Market, whether it is the Belgian BEL20, the French CAC40, the Dutch AEX, the German DAX30 and of course the two American Dow Jones and NASDAQ.

The idea of this article was to merge both hobbies: The Stock Market and GIS. As a Belgian, my interest focuses on the BEL20 which is composed of following companies:

Obsiously, the companies are put on a map based on their addresses. To do the geocoding, I used the HERE geocoding API. The data used for producing the maps are coming from Google Finance and lecho.be. Data have been gathered on Sunday the 26th of April (so data are still outdated when writing this article).

All the maps I did can be visualized in the bel20 Stock Market Index Book (CLICK ON THE PICTURE):

The maps were created within ArcGIS for Desktop. For each address point, I create a buffer with the purpose to extrude it according to a specific value. The document is then exported to ArcGlobe for giving the 3D perspective. The circles are extruded according to the parameters I chose:

• Market Weight
• Market Capitalization
• Stock Evolution the last 5 years
• Average Daily Volume
• Earning Per Share in Euro
• P/E Ratio
• Percentage Change from Year Low
• Percentage Change from Year High

As you will see in the following maps, the companies being part of the BEL20 index are principally located in Brussels. 5 of them are Flemish.

IMPORTANT NOTICE: This Article about combining GIS and the Stock Market has no purpose to give advise on buying or selling positions. This article is only an informative blog.

Here More Details about the individual maps:

Weight in the bel20 Index

As we see from the map, but as well from the table, the winners are GDF Suez, AB Inbev, KBC, Solvay and AGEAS. They are all located in the Brussels Region.

Market Capitalization

The map is not big enough to show the top of the tubes of AB Inbev, and Delta Lloyd.

Stock Evolution since 5 years

The winner over the last 5 years is clearly AB Inbev which rose by 218%!. Telenet, UCB and Ackermans complete the closed club of companies which shares rose by more than 100%. On the other half of the table, we see clear loser like Bekaert (-38%) and GDF Suez (-26,73%).

Avery Daily Volume

The belgian market is clearly monopolized by the Delta Lloyd for which an average of almost 6 million shares changes hand within the day. This is 4 times higher than the second in the list, GBL.

Earning Per Share

The Earning Per Share is an indicator for the value of earning per share. The smaller, the more interesting to buy (I am not a stock buying adviser and this is not a indication to buy!!).

In this optic, Ackermans, Delhaize and AB Inbev are not very interesting stocks while Cofinimmo, Elia and Belgacom are!

P/E Ratio

The P/R is another indicator. The higher it is, the higher are the expectations of future growths in earnings (attention that it can also be the sign of a bubble when it is too high). Solvay, D’Ieteren and UCB are in this way very high.

Percent Change since year low (last 365 days)

From the map and the table, we see the stock that recovered the most from the last 365 days’ low is BPost with a recovery of 62,93% from the bottom. BPost is followed by Belgacom (+61,57%), and KBC (+60,25%).

Percent Change since year high (last 365 days)

Here we have the percentage of loss since year’s high. This is also an interesting topic to see which stocks losses weight in a high bullish market. Bekaert lost about 12.60% from year’s high. It is followed by two real estate companies which are Cofinimmo and Befimmo with respectively -12.31% and 10.45%.