The Best Become the Worst

I really like this graph in today's Wall Street Journal.

It's from this article.  The author argues that the sectors which performed best for the first nine months of the year also had the worst September.  It's a vertical bar chart.  The blue lines are performance for the first nine months of the year, while the red lines are performance for September.  The middle line is zero, with bars to the right showing losses and those to the left showing gains.  Visually, the argument is that big blue bars facing right are usually married to big red bars facing left.

It would be more conventional to show a scatter plot to demonstrate the negative correlation, but some how the bars give the reader a better sense of relative sizes.  Dots might not adequately represent the magnitude of these losses.

My only suggestion would be to order these industries by performance during the first three quarters of the year, perhaps with the best performers (looks like a tie between technology and consumer discretionary products) on top and the worst performers (probably consumer staples) at the bottom.  It would let you see if the red lines descend in size similarly at a glance, rather than having to go case by case.