Hello everyone.

I am currently working on a data set with trade values broken down into single transactions and have the task to make descriptive graphs.

The problem I face is that there are several values per year. It is structured like this (with about 50,000 observations on 120 countries):

Variables: country years trade_total
Country1 2010 Value 1
Country1 2010 Value 2
Country1 2011 Value 3
Country1 2011 Value 4
Country2 2010 Value 5
Country2 2010 Value 6
Country2 2011 Value 7
Country2 2011 Value 8

So I wanted to do line graphs showing the total value of transactions per year and per country using a code like

twoway line trade_total year, by(country)

But these graphs turn out very bad, because there are several observations per year.

I'm a beginner in stata, so excuse my missing expertise, I didn't find any posts regarding this exact problem when it comes to plotting.