Hi everyone!

You may have seen in the news about the battle between the amateur retail investors of a subreddit called r/WallStreetBets and Melvin Capital over the share prices of GameStop (GME). It made for a pretty engaging story, but it’s also a pretty complex one, unless you know your shorts from your stop losses.

Anyway, the guys over at BI Elite ran a visualisation competition to make sense of this story by combining two datasets - the share price of GME stock, and the title of every post from WSB that was related to GME over the end of January when this all kicked off. I’m delighted to announce I was was chosen as a winner!

Below you can see my entry, but first let me give you a little background on what I’ve done here. I see some epic infographics created by my friends and colleagues who work with Tableau - the standard of visualisations coming out of that community is astounding, and as much as I love PowerPlatform - I don’t think we tend to see the same level of visual design. This has led to a misconception that PowerBI can’t be used for this kind of thing, it’s a business focused tool, and anyone serious about making data beautiful should be using Tableau. Therefore when approaching this challenge I wanted to make a big bold infographic, to tell the story, hopefully in a way you’ll find aesthetically engaging.

To do this I’ve pulled a few different PowerBI tricks, and used some Python in PowerQuery to run sentiment analysis on the data here - might be a separate follow-up post for that later - it only took about 5 lines of code! Anyway, enough rambling - take a look!

Just one final note before you jump in - this infographic contains the full text from the WallStreetBets sub, and they delight in being incredibly offensive. There is a censor already in place you can disable if you are OK with this - but be warned if you are easily offended you might want to give this one a miss!

That was a long one! Hope you enjoyed it though. As a reward for making it through, here’s a picture of Sherlock relaxing in a teepee, after all the WSB excitement. He wasn’t actually that interested in it all though, to be fair.