Yield Illusions Entry #0924 Classified Declassified

The reason a chart starts on the day the return looked best

A performance chart begins at a chosen date, and starting on the low point makes every later value an impressive gain, turning selection of the axis into the story.

Filed by The Archivist 2 min read

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Plate 824 — The steep climb that began at a carefully chosen bottom

Intuition test — answer before you read on

Why can a rising performance chart mislead even when its data are accurate?

A protocol showed a chart of its token climbing steeply, proof of strong returns. The chart began on a specific date — the exact local bottom after a crash. Measured from that trough, everything after looked like relentless growth. Started three months earlier, the same chart would have shown a collapse followed by a partial recovery. The trajectory had not changed; only the chosen origin had. The impressive return was manufactured by where the axis began, not by what the asset did.

What everyone sees

A depositor sees a chart rising from left to right and reads consistent strength: the line goes up, so the asset performs. The visual is persuasive and immediate. The depositor accepts the start date as neutral, not realising it was selected, and reads a story of growth that is really a story about which day was chosen to be day one.

What is actually happening

Research on the misuse of statistics documents start-date selection as a classic distortion: performance is acutely sensitive to the chosen baseline, and beginning at a trough maximises the apparent gain. The same series can show triumph or disaster depending only on the origin. A chart without a justified, representative start date measures the presenter’s choice of axis as much as the asset’s behaviour.

Why it stays hidden

The hidden mechanism is baseline selection masquerading as neutral history. The data are real, but the start date is an argument. By anchoring the chart at the lowest point, the protocol converts a partial recovery into an unbroken ascent, and the depositor reads the axis choice as the asset’s merit. The persuasion is in the origin, hidden in plain sight at the left edge.

A chart starting at the bottom makes anything look like a rise. The start date is the argument; the line just follows it.

A chart starting at the bottom makes anything look like a rise. The start date is the argument; the line just follows it.

The hidden part — entry #0924

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A chart starting at the bottom makes anything look like a rise. The start date is the argument; the line just follows it.

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Sources & further reading 2
  1. Huff — How to Lie with Statistics (1954)
  2. Aramonte, Huang & Schrimpf — DeFi Risks and the Decentralisation Illusion (BIS, 2021)
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