The most commonly used market research tool is a price graph or chart. Price graphs may be employed to determine where the current price of a security is in relationship to the prices the security made for some relevant period of time by displaying the historical activity for a security. For example, did the security reach a new 1-month high or is the security priced uncommonly low compared to the prices attained over the last year?

The “Money & Investing” section of The Wall Street Journal contains price graphs for certain major investment sectors. For example, this newspaper will graphically display the daily closing price for the Dow Jones Industrial Average for the last two calendar years. XMIM allows a user to construct this type of research by building a query. The type of query that graphs price history for an investment is easy to construct. Queries, as mentioned earlier, are English-like questions created about a database consisting of time series data. In the XMIM language the query will SHOW the daily closing price of a security WHEN the date falls within the last two years. Using a SHOW attribute in the Query Builder to build this query, it is necessary to select the symbol (the security of interest) and the column or data series that relates to that symbol (the closing price). This combination of a symbol + a column is a complete description of a times series and the simplest form of what will be referred to as an attribute. Next, the query can be limited to some relevant period of time (e.g., within 2 years) by adding a date condition to the query. These concepts will become clearer as you continue to work through the materials in the manual.