[Atlas Sneezed]

Log scales tend to flatten out rising charts, thus masking unstable rises.

Comment? Discussion?

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What log-scale charts do very well is show constant annual increases as straight lines. If gold goes up by a healthy (for gold) but stable 15% per year, it shows as a straight sloping line.

That way, you can look at the chart, and see that a given slope in the past and low prices and a given slope recently might have the same slope.

A linear scale would show the same rates of increase as being very flat if at low prices, and very steep at high prices. Worse, they obscure real information and distinctions by making steep rises look vertical, even though there may be major differences in the rate of increase. The current rise and the 1980 spike look the same in the linear graph, but the significant difference is revealed in the log graph.

A log scale won’t give you an alarming hockey-stick graph in the long term of a gradually rising value, which might be important to illustrate. But the hockey stick obscures lots of data useful to investors.

[lentulusgracchus]

So your bottom line is that the log-scale straight line is real information and not suppressive or distortive, and you infer tradable stability in recent increases rather than listric increases and unsupportable instability.

Thanks for discussing.