Question: Do you find it hard to get financial ratio?

[yawnyawn]

I use paid site for stock search, and preliminary research. Once the stock goes into my monitoring list, I will create a excel for it. The financial ratio, even from paid site, might be misleading. It is not due to errors, but "noises" from one-time entries, non-cash items and etc. Adjustments are needed to catch the "real" picture.

Having said so, I recall one of our buddy, KopiKat, did auto extraction of financial ratio, by script, from free sites. He did mention that he spend just minutes to update his excel sheets. For those interested, you might want to search for his posts on the topic

Hi Cityfarmer, do you mind sharing which paid site you are using? I will like to subscribe to it if I find it better than the ones I am using. Does it cover the HK/US market too? Thanks.

Currently I am using free sources from google finance and Morningstar. It is not that accurate sometimes if there are one-time entries like revaluation gains etc.

[CityFarmer]

I use paid site for stock search, and preliminary research. Once the stock goes into my monitoring list, I will create a excel for it. The financial ratio, even from paid site, might be misleading. It is not due to errors, but "noises" from one-time entries, non-cash items and etc. Adjustments are needed to catch the "real" picture.

Having said so, I recall one of our buddy, KopiKat, did auto extraction of financial ratio, by script, from free sites. He did mention that he spend just minutes to update his excel sheets. For those interested, you might want to search for his posts on the topic

Hi Cityfarmer, do you mind sharing which paid site you are using? I will like to subscribe to it if I find it better than the ones I am using. Does it cover the HK/US market too? Thanks.

Currently I am using free sources from google finance and Morningstar. It is not that accurate sometimes if there are one-time entries like revaluation gains etc.

I am using Shareinvest.com at the moment. It seems many buddies here using the same. We should charge Shareinvest.com for advertisement fee

[arriyana]

what other kind of information do you all consider when making a decision apart from financial ratio?

Do you do research on how the business is, the customer satisfaction, groundwork, etc? Do you find those information useful?

[arriyana]

I tried to do a search on KopiKat but can't seem to find that post. Do you remember any other keywords that can help me find it?

I use paid site for stock search, and preliminary research. Once the stock goes into my monitoring list, I will create a excel for it. The financial ratio, even from paid site, might be misleading. It is not due to errors, but "noises" from one-time entries, non-cash items and etc. Adjustments are needed to catch the "real" picture.

Having said so, I recall one of our buddy, KopiKat, did auto extraction of financial ratio, by script, from free sites. He did mention that he spend just minutes to update his excel sheets. For those interested, you might want to search for his posts on the topic

[CityFarmer]

I tried to do a search on KopiKat but can't seem to find that post. Do you remember any other keywords that can help me find it?

I use paid site for stock search, and preliminary research. Once the stock goes into my monitoring list, I will create a excel for it. The financial ratio, even from paid site, might be misleading. It is not due to errors, but "noises" from one-time entries, non-cash items and etc. Adjustments are needed to catch the "real" picture.

Having said so, I recall one of our buddy, KopiKat, did auto extraction of financial ratio, by script, from free sites. He did mention that he spend just minutes to update his excel sheets. For those interested, you might want to search for his posts on the topic

I did a simple random search, I got the following thread

http://www.valuebuddies.com/thread-2051-...l#pid24842

I didn't explore further, You might want to browse thru the thread. May be swakoo can provide more hints and tips.

[yawnyawn]

I use paid site for stock search, and preliminary research. Once the stock goes into my monitoring list, I will create a excel for it. The financial ratio, even from paid site, might be misleading. It is not due to errors, but "noises" from one-time entries, non-cash items and etc. Adjustments are needed to catch the "real" picture.

Having said so, I recall one of our buddy, KopiKat, did auto extraction of financial ratio, by script, from free sites. He did mention that he spend just minutes to update his excel sheets. For those interested, you might want to search for his posts on the topic

Hi Cityfarmer, do you mind sharing which paid site you are using? I will like to subscribe to it if I find it better than the ones I am using. Does it cover the HK/US market too? Thanks.

Currently I am using free sources from google finance and Morningstar. It is not that accurate sometimes if there are one-time entries like revaluation gains etc.

I am using Shareinvest.com at the moment. It seems many buddies here using the same. We should charge Shareinvest.com for advertisement fee

Thanks! Will take a look.

[arriyana]

Gotta bump this question a bit. Anyone?

what other kind of information do you all consider when making a decision apart from financial ratio?

Do you do research on how the business is, the customer satisfaction, groundwork, etc? Do you find those information useful?

[dzwm87]

Never trust 3rd party's numbers. Even bloomberg is not 100% perfect and you are paying thousands for it.

I prefer to get the numbers from the exact source (i.e. financial statements/annual reports). Sometimes, even the financial statements could be wrong too! Morningstar is a good source for really old FS.

I also have an excel template which currently takes me less than an hour to churn out all the historical figures. Analyzing it and understanding the business operations will probably take much longer.

[arriyana]

Of course. But understandably, if you have multiple sources for multiple companies, it will take a lot of time.

What information do you wish you have but find it so tedious to obtain that it makes little sense?

[Shrivathsa]

The toughest one to get is cash return on invested capital.

To the best of my knowledge, it is not actually available on any site, paid or free, does not really matter.

As far as I know it has to be calculated for each stock that you want it for.

Yes, it takes a lot of time to calculate, but almost all the time, helps you to say no to stocks, as a rule of thumb, run 100 stocks past this and chances are maybe 5 will survive the test.