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Back-to-School Spending
Americans spend over $75 billion this back-to-school season for both K-12 and college students. About 2/3 of the dollars spend went to college students with an average spend per student of $889 for...
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Ivy League Endowment Fund Performance
While Harvard University has by far the largest endowment of the ivies, its ten year annualized return is in the middle of the pack. Princeton, Columbia and Yale have posted 10+% returns. The other...
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Makeover My Chart
The cluster bar chart is often the first chart type to try when showing financial data from a Profit and Loss statement. This chart type does allow you to see the relationship between revenue and cost...
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Federal Tax Subsidies for Sports Stadiums
The US Federal government has provided $3.7B in tax subsidies for private sports stadiums, according to a Brookings Institute study. Major League Baseball and the National Football League received...
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Top 10 UK Travel Destinations
London had over 18 million visitors in 2015, which was the most of any UK destination. These visitors spend over £110 per day and stayed 6 days. While visitors stayed at other destinations longer,...
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Economic Cost of Government Internet Shutdowns
National governments who shut down all or part of the internet cost their economies more than $2.4 billion over the past year, according to a Brookings Institute study. Ten countries account for almost...
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Tesla’s Revenue and Profit Growth
Tesla’s revenue grew tenfold between 2012 and 2015. Its expenses, however, kept pace and it has not shown a profit. Investors were undeterred. Tesla’s stock price grew from $34 at the end of 2012 to...
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AT&T and Time Warner Merger
AT&T announced a $85B merger with Time Warner on October 22nd. The merger will bring Warner Brothers, CNN and HBO under AT&T’s control. The Marimekko chart below shows what the combined...
View ArticleMekko Graphics 7.0.600.425 Release Notes
Mekko Graphics 7.0.600.425 Release Notes Overview – This release is a minor update to 7.0.400.422. The image saving issue introduced by Office 2016 (version 15.27) was fixed. Note that this release is...
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Americans Without Health Insurance
Even after the passage of the Affordable Care Act, there are 27 million non-elderly Americans who do not have health insurance. Almost 12 million are eligible for medicaid or tax credits and have not...
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2016 Election Dashboard
We created this single page dashboard to give you an overview of the forecasts and the impact of the election on financial markets. In this first chart, we compared national poll data for Clinton and...
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Facebook’s Worldwide Revenue Challenge
Facebook is challenged to grow its revenue per user outside of North America and Europe. These regions account for only 1/3 of Facebook users, but make up 75% of its revenue. Revenue per user is over...
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Legalized Marijuana Is Spreading Through the US
Based on recent ballot initiatives, recreational marijuana use will be legal for about 20% of the US population. Over 60% will live in states that permit medical marijuana usage. The Marimekko chart...
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Black Friday Trend
Retail analysts are expecting a strong holiday shopping season in the U.S. this year. Some experts have predicted the fall of Black Friday as the most dominant shopping day of the season since...
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Hate Crimes in the US
Almost 60% of the hate crimes in the US were racially motivated, according to FBI data from 2015. Religion and sexual orientation were the other two major hate crime categories. Three targeted...
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Top 5 Charts
We reviewed all of the charts from the Chart of the Week series for 2016 and we noticed that there were significant differences in popularity, both by chart type and topic, as compared to 2015. In...
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Netflix International Growth is Hurting Its Profits
Netflix is growing at about 25% per year with most of its new members coming from outside the US. This international growth has been a drain on its profits of between $15M and $109M per quarter over...
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Christmas Tree Purchases
Americans bought about 38 million Christmas trees in the 2015 holiday season. Two-thirds of these trees were real. While Americans spent more per tree on artificial trees, the total retail value of...
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Massachusetts Students Test Performance
Massachusetts students scored higher than the US and OECD averages in reading, science and math in the PISA test. Singapore scored highest and outperformed Massachusetts in all three subject test with...
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Why Would I Use a Bar Mekko?
We each have our own preferences when choosing a chart type and often these evolve over the course of a career. The various strategy consulting firms are known to have favored chart types. McKinsey has...
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