Opportunity
My partner is into investing. He’s also quite good at it. He used to send a joke ‘memo’ every couple months to his mom and I about our investment portfolio (saip: Sam Alex investment partnership). I then joked we should actually make a newsletter, and here we are. He decides and writes the content and I edit. We both find the data. I create graphs to help readers understand what he’s talking about.

Approach
There’s not a lot of accessible or unintimidating investing content out there. So that’s the gap we’re trying to bridge. SAIP aims to help people who want to invest, and who invest already, have an informed approach while having some fun reading about it. I use this opportunity to put to practice things I’ve learned in my MADV programme.  I include a section called The Data, inspired by The Pudding’s data methodology section,  describing  what data source we used, how I did the calculations, and any caveats.

Tools

• Google Sheets

• Raw Graphs

• Flourish 

• Adobe Illustrator

• Substack

Collaborator

• Alex Ross

 Although data visualisation was a key part of the SAIP newsletter, I knew tone of voice and colours would be important to connect with our audience. Any data visualisation needed to be wrapped in the right way.  I wanted to use recognisable charts and graphs but my main goal was to make them engaging, accessible and easy to understand. 

SAIP was born from a content gap, so there’s not a lot of inspiration. However, data around stocks lends well to area graphs, which in addition to one of my favourite examples, The Pudding’s Wiki Deaths, there’s plenty of.  Bloomberg’s instagram is also  useful inspiration. My main priority was  bright, cheerful colours, atypical of investing, that were also accessible.