About
The Trees
Each tree represents one asset or index and is drawn from real financial data. Like a real tree, the first year is at the center and each new year adds a ring at the edge. One ring is one calendar year of returns.
A wider ring is a year of stronger growth. The ring's color is also based on return: a loss is red-brown, a gain is pale, and the stronger the year, the stronger the tone. Denser grain and wavier ring edges mark a more volatile year.
A scar is a major drawdown. It starts in the ring of the low and runs outward until the asset is back above the peak it fell from. A scar that reaches the outer edge has not yet recovered.
Every mark decodes to a number computed from real daily prices. The methodology page gives the exact definitions and their limits.
Data Sources
Equity, fund, bond, commodity and currency price history is data provided by Twelve Data. Crypto market data is data provided by CoinGecko.
The century-long market and industry series come from the Kenneth R. French Data Library.
The Treasury trees are computed from Federal Reserve Board yields via FRED; oil and gas spot prices are from the U.S. Energy Information Administration; copper is from the IMF Primary Commodity Prices.
The U.K. stock market tree is the Bank of England's spliced monthly share price index from 1709 (Open Government Licence), continued from 2017 by the OECD share price index for the United Kingdom via FRED.
The site publishes derived statistics, never the underlying daily prices; annual returns are rounded to a whole percent.
Data is provided as is and may be delayed, incomplete or inaccurate. Educational, not investment advice. Company, fund and index names are trademarks of their owners and appear only to identify the asset a tree describes.