Home office financial data service

Water Cooler Investing
#1

So every now and then I like to work at home or at weekends on special projects or even for my own interest. The problem is that I haven’t found a good financial data source for private usage that comes at a reasonable cost. We have Bloomberg Anywhere in the office, but it is an office license and meant for team members who are on sick leave or work from home after having a baby. It is not something I could take home whenever I want and I don’t think doing private research would benefit my employer in any way.

Up to now I have been working with readily accessible free sources (Morningstar, yahoo, etc.), but would rather have a source that comprises everything. Currently I would pay up to $1,000/year for a service that provides the following:

-quarterly/annual filings with export to excel function

-snapshot overview of the company (ratios, highlighted news, charts)

-historical price data + export function

-daily price updates, tick data is not necessary

-reminders of earnings announcements, corp events, macro data releases, conference calls

-analyst reports, rating decisions

-coverage: US all caps, Europe mid to large caps, rest of the world established large caps

-selected research in commodities, real estate and macro data

I know much of that stuff can be found for free on a trillion different sites, but I am looking for a user friendly site or application (not some brute like Thomson One Banker). I heard AAII is pretty good?!

#2

seclive.com is good for exporting stuff from edgar

for data feed - someone posted a link here to a site that has boatload of data from financial to anything else…i forgot the name but im sure someone here will remember

#3

here is the data feed site: http://www.quandl.com/

#4

thx for those links, but I am not fully sold on quandl. I did some queries of more “exotic” mid caps and foudn the data to be unreliable, I know because I already cover those companies and found better data elsewhere (Morningstar). Seclive seems great for getting spreadsheet data, although I would really prefer having a neat all in one solution and as mentioned before I would not mind actually paying for a little more comfort. I just don’t want to go full pro with a Bloomberg, Reuters or CapitalIQ private license.

#5

ycharts.com is trying to fill this void. its just okay to me… has good excel exporting and fundamanetal data (but written analysis compared to morningstar etc lacks), but comparing to bloomberg etc is very difficult (esp for “selected research in commodities, real estate and macro data”)

#6

How much would CapitalIQ run for a individual license I wonder…

#7

I think most providers only offer office solutions and capIQ comes at 30k/year for 4 workstations as far as I have heard

#8

Quandl is a Wiki model. If you find errors, report them and show where the accurate data is. They are still in development, but it’s not going to have all the data you want. Only deals in time series.

Doesn’t Morningstar have what you need? What about Mergent?

#9

Morningstar is pretty good, but data export is not really as straightforward as it could be. Also, I dont like their analyst reports. Most are outdated or outright stupid. Sure, I could ignore them, but if you pull up a stock and you see a fair value estimate that is way off and you know it still tends to stick with you. Another problem is that their portfolio functions sometimes do not accept stocks, that are denominated in non-standard currencies.

Beyond that - and that could only be me being overly picky - Morningstar is extremely slow. It takes ages to navigate tabs and sections. Sure, there is a reason why Bloomberg charges so much for its superior workflow and fast servers, but I’d expect their would be some middle way between Google Finance and the like and Bloomberg - Bloomberg lite so to say.

#10

Compared to Bloomberg’s cost, not sure if a Bloomberg lite is only 1,000 a year. Does Value Line offer exportable financials? I never used digital stuff from Value Line, only their printed stuff

#11

I think some of the Morningstar analyst are pretty good. They all have to follow the Morningstar methodology, but each individual analyst does author their own reports. Sure, it’s the minor leagues(triple A), but some can really play. Granted, the best ones move on, but I don’t think I have run across too much that is just plain “stupid”. Do you have an example? I offer almost any one of their reports as an example that is not “stupid.” It reminds me of the treatment offered at a teaching hospital. Generally pretty good and the practitioners may not be the most experienced but they have access to those that are and those that are on the cutting edge.

#12

It’s $18K for one license. If you order 3 licenses under the same roof, it’s $36K total.

#13

Yeah they do, not sure about cost though. It’s pricey. I don’t know if it’s more or less than CapIQ. Honestly though, CapIQ is the best product on the market so unless ValueLine is a lot cheaper, it’s better to go with CapIQ (for equities). For Fixed Income, Bloomberg is the best.

Obviously these are not really affordable for home licenses so I am speaking more from a professional license perspective. I don’t have a good recommendation on a home data license. I’ve used all the major data products (CapIQ, Bloomberg, Factset) and the only one I would personally pay for is CapIQ.

Anyone interested should look into the Thompson Reuters product. I don’t know how much it costs. Probably less than CapIQ but still not cheap.

#14

I don’t know about the various levels, but I remember Value Line being around 1K for individuals. I found this on their website:

Access to the online version of The Value Line Investment Survey. No Print materials will be mailed.

1 Year - 598.00 See sections below for more details of the offer. The Value Line Investment Survey - Savvy Investor 995 /year

This digital package is the most comprehensive research tool that Value Line offers to non-professional investors. – If you are serious about building your net worth, let the full power of our unique, in-depth research work on your behalf.

Savvy Investor is the only package that gives you access to the Value Line universe of approximately 3,500 large, medium and small cap companies across more than ninety industries. Make smart buy/sell/hold decisions by consulting our performance-proven ranks and ratings.

Exclusive Benefits Coverage

  • Approximately 3,500 equities
  • 1,700 analyst covered stocks, including more than 150 foreign equities
  • 1,800 small- and mid-cap stocks
    Content
  • Value Line proprietary ranks, ratings, estimates, projections, peer comparisons, analyst commentary, research notes, industry analysis and more
  • PDFs of classic Value Line company and industry reports
  • Stock quotes
  • SEC filings
  • Financial statements
  • Insider transactions
  • Institutional and fund ownership
  • Company news
  • Price history
    Historical Data
  • Up to 10 years of select proprietary data:
    • Valuation measures - 10 years
    • Relative price strength - 10 years
    • Annual rates of change – 1 and 5 year rates
#15

Is that a data dump into Excel or is it a digital version of the Value Line tearsheets? It sounds like the latter. Still a pretty good deal. Those were the first data source I used way back in 2006. Ultimately I created my own tearsheet but Value Line was a pretty good place to start IMO – certainly better than the CapIQ templates. And Bloomberg is virtually unusable IMO unless you want to marry the thing. It could not be less intuitive to my way of thinking.

#16

I had a boss that thought this was purposefully the case, to make outsiders think it’s a very specialized knowledge.

#17

I’ve heard that too, that it creates a specialized ecosystem that the user is accustomed after a steep learning curve which makes it hard for them to switch. Ehh, CapIQ is just better if you ask me. It takes about a day or two to get reasonably proficient with the CapIQ platform.

#18

Nah… Bloomberg is good for LOOKING AT things, not working with them. It’s also nice to have one for clients to fool around with. They love pretty charting features.

#19

At Thomson Reuters we recently released a lower cost version of our Eikon platform. Reach out to me if you would like to see some information on it.