A performance comparison between 2D and 3D candlestick charts for cryptocurrencies market operations

Abstract

This work presents a comparison of traders’ performance between 2D candlestick visual ization, used nowadays in day trading platform tools, and a novel 3D candlestick chart. All trading platforms provide a set of tools to traders that can increase their confidence in making an operation. The most important tool is the price visualization timeline. The past price movement is condensed into candlesticks and the platforms display it in a two dimensional format. Each trader can have a visualization of one individual asset at a time or a split-screen with various assets to observe price changes. Instead of using the traditional two-dimensional candlestick visualization, the design in this work displays many assets at a time, using the same candlestick chart presenting multiple cryptocurrencies’ price timelines in the depth coordinate. This technique was developed with the intention to assist traders to compare assets to perform buy or sell operations. An experiment was conducted with users (N=18) on a trading task in either 2D or 3D chart types, with a 50% chance of executing market operations in one of them and measuring the performance. No significant difference in performance was found between charts, and no learning effect was identified overall in a sequence of 15 operations. However, for the 3D chart only, comparing the performance in the initial block of 6 operations with the second block of 9 operations, indicated a significant difference in the means (normal dis tribution). While a loss occurred in both cases, it was significantly larger (p = 0.01593) with the 3D chart (-9.8%) than with the 2D one (-1.9%), which is an indication that the novel design can be further refined.