The back story: As you can see from my alias here, I’m a value investor, but I don’t like conventional stock screening tools. PE ratios and price/book ratios are too crude and have too many inequities. The stocks with rock bottom lowest multiples are mostly imposters and not real bargains. You’ll never ever find top quality stocks like Fastenal or Coca Cola on the lowest PE or lowest price/book lists. I believe in free cash flow, but stock screeners don’t cover that criterion, probably because there’s no official definition.
What I’m aiming for: I’d like to create and use an algorithm that automatically crunches the numbers and gives me estimates for the intrinsic business value for THOUSANDS of stocks. This requires having the detailed balance sheets, income statements, and cash flow statements going back several years. Yes, I know computer programming, so I’m not concerned about writing the algorithm. No, the SEC’s EDGAR site won’t work, because the financial statements aren’t in a uniform format. No, XBRL won’t do, because much of it is inaccurate or unavailable for most companies.
My question: Who provides detailed balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow statement data on stocks in a format that’s easily parsed and at a reasonable price? (Unlike many of you, I don’t work for a financial firm.) I think Bloomberg offers this, but the price is overkill.
That looks great. I’m curious: How do you get all that detailed financial data AND verify it? I know from past experience that some of the data on Yahoo Finance is invalid. (For that matter, how do firms like Morningstar and Zacks get all that detailed financial data?)
We use tagged financial statements (aka XBRL) for the as-reported data which allows us to deliver higher data quality much more efficiently than the legacy data providers. We can pass the cost savings onto our customers. Our technology also allows us to go deeper into the financials with our standardized footnotes.
Every filing goes through hundreds of quality checks before being deployed to the database so we think it is the highest quality financial data in the industry.
Has XBRL improved dramatically? From what you’re saying, it sounds like it has. To be fair, the articles complaining that most firms aren’t XBRL-compliant are several years old. Of course, if the issues have been resolved, then there’s no reason for anyone to still talk about it.
XBRL still has its issues related to data quality and custom extensions but our system was built around those challenges to make sure the data is correct and consistent. We could not collect accurate and timely financials on 7,000+ companies without it but there is still plenty of room for improvement.
How good is your bank data? I’ve been looking for a bad data provider but intrinio discontinued their stuff seems like reg data would be simple compared to 10ks
Our bank data at the moment is pulled from SEC filings and put into an industry-specific banking taxonomy that we created. In addition, we are working on collecting the call report data from the FDIC. Please PM me so that we can discuss further as I’m curious if there is specific data you are looking for.
seems like reg data would be simple compared to 10ks