No red in financial data

I agree that that this is conventional wisdom, but more and more I've been seeing it as one of those "know the rules, before you break them" situations.

While I don't think it would be good to have a series of numbers with red being the highlight of a positive value, I have often used red color schemes in bar and pie charts. Work I've done for Bank of America immediately comes to mind. And J&J, although obviously not a financial company.

Companies love seeing their colors and branding, and if their primary color is red, it's just going to find its way into their presentations.

Even in non-financial presentations I used to shy away from red, but lately I've been using it more and more as a nice change of pace.

Agree fully. I just had one situation where a VC ranked his investment returns versus other ones, and that one red line in the see of numbers actually looked off. Like CNN's stock market ticker where negative performance is put in red