The phrase "up and to the right" is common in business discussions to indicate "good metrics." It's a play on that, which similarly has "to the right" superfluously in your opinion.
"Up and to the right" is a relatively common business saying to indicate things are going well and that the chart for a metric (ex: revenue, users, etc) is going "up and to the right". The author made a play on this common business phrase by saying IBM's charts are going "down and to the right"
You are correct, it's redundant. Down and to the right sounds like the sort of thing a sell side analyst or salesperson would say. It could be that you are assuming your audience are unfamiliar with stock graphs, but more likely you are using redundancy for rhetorical effect.
In another section the author describes the performance of IBM against a benchmark as 18,736 basis points, which he calculates by taking the arithmetic difference of a positive return and a negative return (ugh). This just means underperformance of 187.36%. I suspect though once again the use of a 5 digit basis points figure is a rhetorical flourish.
These are just rhetorical nits though. I did enjoy the article, and the numbers and their sources are very clear.
I've heard this term for 20+ years and never questioned it until just now. I think the "to the right" part is meant to convey that profits going up is not just a one time thing, but something that has, or will be happening continually over a period of time.
Well, conceivably, if the total value were to drop to 0 in a very short amount of time, it would be simply “down” (and the inverse, for the far more unlikely event that it increased a few orders of magnitude all at once and then flatlined, appearing to simply go “up”).
