Hi Folks, I was just thinking that I would put what I am learning as part of the CFA exam preparation in practice. To this end, I want to start analyzing some financial statements for publicly traded companies. So, here’s my question: is there any free (or inexpensive) software that helps me do the analysis. Even an Excel plug-in would be fine as well. I have done some searching on the net, but couldn’t find anything on this. Thanks.
WSP?
I’m sorry, but what’s WSP?
factset and capitalIQ offer what you want i think, but they are very expensive for an individual user. there’s also a product called fetchXL
VirginCFAHooker - may his handle rest in peace - pointed out the American Association of Independent Investors has a database called Stock Investor Pro, which, for a $250/year subscription ($200/year if you are a member of AAII) gets you lots of fundamental data for up to about 7 years for publicly traded companies on NYSE, AMEX, NASDAQ, and I think a few others. You can run screens and all sorts of things. It’s not as advanced and full featured as factset and capitalIQ, but unless you’re ready to drop multi-$1000s per year, it’s about the best value for money I’ve seen in this area. I’m not familiar with FetchXL, other than that the price is around $4000/year IIRC.
may God also bless bchadwick handle’s soul for pointing us to that mother lode of tools
is this the main individual investor association? or do they have a competitor worth checking out also?
I don’t know of a competing organization off hand, but if anyone finds one, I’d be curious to compare. I’ve found AAII to be reasonable value. Some of the stuff they have is a bit basic and more oriented (understandably) to people just trying to manage for their retirement, but I really like their ETF reviews (so you can compare a bunch of ETFs that might be useful for implementing a particular strategy). Also, they do some comparisons of portfolio management software and trading software that ordinary users might want to use/buy.
their sentiment survey goes back to 1987, weekly. thats a good data series for contrarian indicators. overall, good stuff. bchad - did you subscribe to the stock investor pro data? any comments? is it clean?
I can’t tell how clean the data is, since I don’t have a good basis for comparison. However, on first blush, it looks fairly complete (not too many blank fields). The data source is Thompson Reuters, so I suppose it’s as good as their stuff is.