Through the magic of Google Sheets I can easily track the daily value of my portfolio. I have data going back to June 14, 2016; that’s when I added the auto-updating trigger to my Google Sheet.
This is the chart that Google Sheets draws for me by default:
There’s a lot there that a body could lose sleep over. Big gains and big drops galore.
But the chart, like most financial charts, is somewhat misleading. Because the y-axis isn’t based at 0. If I force Google Sheets to redraw the exact same data series but with a y-axis based on 0 it looks like this:
That looks…a lot less interesting.
Sometimes it is worthwhile to remember to take a step back.
