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10 year financials?


Homestead31

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Is there a correlation between investment performance and having the highest quality data?

I can`t see a reason to pay for data, but of course i understand that people that sell data have a different view on this aspect. :)

 

Maybe not. But several times when I used GuruFocus' screeners to look for cheap stocks, the results for European stocks were partly invalid due to the bad data-quality - e.g., because they did not account for stock splits or other corporate actions. For a few stocks that I know well, I have found data errors that resulted in strange value metrics.

 

But you are right - these issues will not damage my portfolio performance, because I will not blindly buy or sell based on metrics alone. But I like to use valuation metrics as a starting point, and finding and understanding these data errors costs time - and I fear that I am seeing only the tip of the iceberg...

 

I know that attaining good data quality is difficult and that banks - or especially funds managers - invest a lot of money into fixing data quality issues.

 

Thus, I appreciate data quality and am willing to pay reasonable amounts for it (however, I am not willing to pay more than 1% of my portfolio capital, hence Bloomberg or - even more desirable - Capital IQ are way out of reach, at the moment).

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Yes, the $100 tool reference was Morningstar. For a while they had a deal where it was. $100 a year if you subscribed through a Fidelity link.

 

Their database is excellent. [...] Their international coverage is impressive.

 

Thank you, that's great to hear.

 

Sounds like a bargain, I will give them a try.

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I've seen people make investment mistakes because they have bad data. Easy to make a bad decision if you don't have the whole story.

 

Is the blame on the service provider or the investors not validating their numbers with regulatory filings though?

 

Service providers should provide good data.

Investors should validate the data.

 

It is somewhat easy to validate data against SEC filings. It might be tough if company does not SEC file (OTC, foreign - excluding some countries that have easy SEC-equivalent access).

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It is somewhat easy to validate data against SEC filings. It might be tough if company does not SEC file (OTC, foreign - excluding some countries that have easy SEC-equivalent access).

 

Yes, that's probably the reason why data quality can be an issue for European stocks - we don't have anything comparable to EDGAR, over here :-(

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Anyone tried Ycharts or Money.net as a data source?  Both have been touted in the media as bloomberg replacements...

 

They both use Morningstar as their datasource.  I've seen a few demos from "bloomberg killers" and they are nothing special.  Bloomberg excels in harvesting very unique data sources. 

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This weekend GuruFocus started offering an Excel Add-In for their Premium subscribers.  I've been a Premium subscriber for a couple years and must admit this is a great new feature.  It downloads 20 years of annual and quarterly financial data straight into an Excel spreadsheet.  Plus you can get Portfolio and Guru reports downloaded too although I haven't played around with those much yet. 

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  • 1 year later...

There are clearly certain problems in rocketfinancial, e.g. BRK.A Shareholders Equity in the early 2000's:

http://www.rocketfinancial.com/Financials.aspx?fID=1058&p=2&i=7&pw=34872&rID=2&tID=2&stID=1&segID=-1

 

but a lot of the data seems good and subject to checking, could well be useful for examining trends and cyclicality of basic metrics. I like that it offers to show the data "as presented" or "standardized view"

 

For a light user only interested in a modest number of companies, it looks like a very handy resource for some basic sanity checking and early stage research, which can be followed up on later by digging through the filings.

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  • 1 year later...

BOOT IPO'd in 2014.

 

lol, BOOT was a terrible example. It's working again for me. :)

 

Here's a better example using Middleby: http://financials.morningstar.com/ratios/r.html?t=midd&region=USA&culture=en_US

 

The above shows between 55 million and 57 million shares from 2009 to present.

 

rocketfinancial.com has different share count numbers for 2010 and 2011. They have 18.3 million and 18.5 million, respectfully (diluted).

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Guest Schwab711

I have had a lot of issues with data quality when using Rocket. I don't know how they miss on some data points like this (where share count is not complicated). I only use their per store financials but take them with a grain of salt.

 

Depending on how tech savvy you are, it might be worth looking in to XBRL add-ins for Excel to pull directly from EDGAR. I think all financials are XBRL based now. Also, you can download financials on EDGAR from 10ks.

 

As for websites, Morningstar and gurufocus are the only reliable ones I know with some of this data :/.

 

This was another reason I ended up as a quality investor. It was hard to get data quickly so I had to focus my research.

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