A few months ago I released a free spreadsheet which collected financial data from the web on a chosen stock and pulled it into a nice summary sheet. I was frustrated when doing this by the problems that occur when trawling the web for data, web pages constantly change name, data moves about and the result is the spreadsheet doesn’t work as fluently as I would have liked and continually has errors.
Also there are many problems with free financials from the web, they are not comprehensive and often incomplete.
Professional investors have access to expensive packages like Bloomberg terminals or FactSet data that give them an unrivaled quality of data at the click of a button which saves countless hours of compiling data from 10-K’s. Unfortunately for single investors like us the $1k+ per month fees for such data are out of reach. I explored many of the cheaper data sources on offer for single investors, but none gave me the detail and coverage that I was looking for.
So I had an ambition, what if I could secure access to one of these professional quality data sources and share it around enough people to make the cost worthwhile. I decided to investigate the costs of buying access to the raw data myself and the costs of distributing this to other people.
Fast forward a few months to now, and I have managed to get trial access to some data and am ready to share this with my readers to see what people think of the idea and the product I have come up with. I won’t be advertising this at all for the moment, I want to give my loyal readers a chance to try it out and have an input into how I develop it further.
So enough of the waffle, here is the spreadsheet which you can download and begin using immediately. It requires Excel 2003 or later.
As I only have access to trial data for the moment it is limited to companies in the Dow Jones, the final product will cover all North America. The spreadsheet is designed to serve five main purposes
- Provide the longest and most detailed historical financials – annual data going back 20 years, with detailed breakdowns of the financial statements
- Provides seasonally adjusted quarterly data, going back 20 quarters – measure progress on a quarterly basis ignoring seasonal effects
- Allow the user to build a fully customisable tearsheet to allow printable, fast analysis
- Cash flow and earnings quality checks graphically illustrated for ease of use
- Discounted Cash Flow model that users can customize, as well as the historical valuations ratios of EV/EBITDA, P/E and P/B that the stock has traded at over the last 10 years.
I have tried to balance ready made content, with raw data that the users can customize and present to their tastes.
What do I want from you?
This is a sort of testing the waters, I am looking for feedback on how the product works and what changes you would want to see in order to actually consider parting with your hard earned money for it.
My goal is to sell this for around $20-30 a month, which is pretty competitive and I think much more comprehensive than alternatives such as Value Line. But at this low cost I would need a pretty substantial user base in order to cover the high fees that come with this data and licence to distribute. I am willing to take the risk and pay the upfront fees if enough people show interest initially.
I am aware of other competing sources of this information on the web and spreadsheets, but I have tried to make something different here for users that they wont find anywhere else. My focus is on supplying the best, most comprehensive raw data source on the market that is currently only available to institutions.
Most other providers give value added information and summary info only, which I have tried to do too, but I want to do it alongside the raw data which most other providers don’t give in such detail.
So please try it out, its completely free, you won’t even need to give me your email or anything. If you have comments and feedback please leave them below, or contact me directly at mail@investingsidekick.com.
Wow, it is definitely comprehensive.
I moved a few things around and it caused a few issues, I guess I did something I shouldn’t have but apart from that I was very impressed.
Yes this is just a prototype so not that flexible, but the final product will be fully customizable so you can move everything you want and it will still update automatically for you
which data source are you accessing?
It uses Morningstars institutional data feed. I contacted a couple of providers like Factset and Thomson Reuters but Morningstar offer the best service, at least initially.
Love it! Its very comprehensive and easy to read data. How do you ensure that the data is clean? Factset I think shows how the financials are pulled directly from the SEC fillings. Does morning star have any such reconcilations?
I looked all over for data feeds and everything for just too expensive. I finally settled for mergentonline, the UI is not great but the data goes back over 20 years.
The cleanliness of data is up to Morningstar really, I dont have the resource to check it all but it mostly seems good considering the detail. FactSet may be a little more reliable but the costs are just too great at this stage. I may change once the subscriber base is big enough for me to start paying big bucks for FactSet data.
Yeh datafeeds are ridiculous, I didn’t find one for under £1,000 a month, and on top of that you pay if you distribute. Morningstar are the most relaxed about sharing their data which is why they’re the best option, at least while I’m getting this off the ground.
I’ll check out Mergentonline, not heard of them before
Thanks for all the feedback, I’m deactivating the data and working on the spreadsheet further so you won’t be able to log in anymore
When might u put the spreadsheet back up would love to have a look at it
Not sure yet still getting things sorted. You can still download the spreadsheet though and see the financials for AT&T, but now it can’t update financials for a different ticker but you can still get an idea of what’s included.