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Portfolio123 » List all forums » Forum: Feature Suggestions » Thread: Date of data reported |
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Total posts in this thread: 9 |
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gviersen
Advanced Member
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Marco, Unfortunately, I have noticed that several times this earnings season the Reuters data has not been updated the week of an earnings announcement for one of my portfolio companies or for a recommended stock in my weekly rebalancing. In one case I actually purchased a reommended stock because I mistakenly thought the P123 data included the new announcement. THREE WEEKS later (today) I get a sell recommendation on the stock which, digging into it, results from the updated financials from the October 29th earnings announcement. So I bought the stock on old information that I thought was already updated. This delay was not an isolated occurrence this earnings season - I noticed it on a number of occasions when I checked new rankings on my portfolio companies the week after their earnings announcements. My fault for not checking more closely and losing money. However, since Reuters won't allow you to display the raw data, sometimes confirming the fundamental metrics is tricky based solely on rankings. Two problems, one of which obviously is that the data needs to be timely, which is a problem you need to work out with Reuters. The second problem is that we do not KNOW whether the data is up-to-date or not. That problem is a problem you can fix by including a "Date Reported" field for the fundamental data used in any time period. That way, at least, we will know if we are using old data or updated data in screens, sims and, especially, portfolios. I would include it in the user-available reporting fields for the new screener functionality, as well. It should also be available as a buy/sell screen for sims and ports (to test for current information). I assume this field is available from Reuters, I am pretty sure it is a field that S&P/Compustat reports in their database, at least for current data. I would add one other suggestion that would help tremendously in earnings season. That would be the functionality to input a set of results for each factor in a given ranking system and get a rank for that set of "ad-hoc" factor results. That way I could calculate the factors for a company on announcement day and get an approximate new rank that day without having to wait for the Saturday data load. The fact that I am using P123 to manage some real money at this point shows my faith in the product. But, timeliness of the data is critical for this product to be effective. The more work I need to do to double-check everything the less valuable P123 is to me as a tool. Thanks |
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marco
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Gary, thanks for reporting this. Data timeliness is the reason why we chose Reuters since they are the best data aggregator. I'd like to dig deeper into the problem you saw with the earnings estimates, since I believe they collect it themselves now. Can you tell me which stock had this problem. Please include as much details as you can. Since you got a sell three weeks later, it makes me think that maybe they update their estimates database once a month, but I seriouosly doubt that. We collect the data once a week on Saturday. I'll double check when Reuters does the weekend update to make sure I'm not running the download too soon. Every weekend should have the latest data available/know as of that day. When you run a screen, the update date of the data is reported in the green header. We're planning to download the data from Reuters every day which you will be able to use to calculate the latest ranks. This is a few months off. Thanks for your comments! ---------------------------------------- Portfolio123 Staff |
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DennyHalwes
Advanced Member UNITED STATES Joined: Apr 28, 2004 Posts: 1532 Status: Offline |
Marco, When you get this figured out, will you inform us as to what time on Saturday the data is updated so we don't Rebalance to soon. I normally rebalance on Saturday. Is the "Top Five Model Portfolios-- as of 11/23/04" date on the Home page updated immediately after the new weekend data is updated? Denny  ---------------------------------------- "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking that we were at when we created them". Albert Einstein |
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marco
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I got an explanation of this problem from Reuters. During earnings season they are flooded with reports which include companies all over the world. Since all reports are hand checked, Reuters prioritizes the reports typically by market cap. Larger, widely followed companies get updated by the next day, but for smaller companies the delay could be a week or two (during busy periods). That's the reality and according to them, nobody does it faster more accurately. For now I added the following items to the Stock Ratios page: Latest Quarter Fiscal Year Fundamentals Update Date This page is still under development and looks terrible, but the data is the most current that we have from Reuters, and you can use it to determine if the lastest quarter has been updated. I also strongly suggest to always check the price chart and news for every recommendation. If the price has had sudden jumps recently, you might want to research it more. A future improvement would be to flag a recommendation if the fundamental data has not been updated yet, which I think is possible using another field from Reuters. ---------------------------------------- Portfolio123 Staff |
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danparquette
Advanced Member
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I did an experiment that you guys may find interesting. I watched the data updates in port123 and in the weekly Stock Investor Pro update (from AAII) that I get. The stock was IPSU. The company announced on 12/9. Port123 data was updated on 12/15/04. Stock Investor Pro was updated on 12/25. ---------------------------------------- Dan |
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clq1128
Advanced Member  UNITED STATES Joined: Jun 2, 2004 Posts: 39 Status: Offline |
It seems to me Reuters is pretty slow - to give an example: LIFC which reported earnings on July 25th, some other sites (i.e. MarketWatch, MSN) reflected it the next day. But I don't see that's updated in Reuters even today and P123 still says its PE is 85 today (July 30th, 2005) I also noticed that the LIFC inside trading info hasn't been updated in Reuters as well - on July 20th, insiders exercised totally more than 400,000+ shares of their options. On July 25th, the price jumped 4 bucks in one day ! This information provides excellent trading opportunity: LIFCHW was only $0.2 on July 22nd and it's $4.5 on July 29th- that's a 2000+% gain in a week ! So providing backtesting for option trading strategy might be another feature worth doing. -Liqiang |
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BJS
Advanced Member
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Until this issue is resolved with Reuters (I'm not really sure if it CAN be resolved), there is a buy rule - WeeksIntoQ - that might have some value for some. This shows how many weeks it has been since the latest quarterly report. So, assuming 99% of companies report on a quarterly basis, we could set a buy rule WeeksIntoQ<10, or something like that. Has anyone used this rule? Brian |
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BJS
Advanced Member
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This is a follow-up to my last post. I tried using WeeksIntoQ in a couple of my sims, and it seems there's a problem with this rule. I input a new buy rule WeeksIntoQ<=10. This dropped the annual return in one sim by about 20 points, and affected the annual return in the other sim by around 2 points. Then, just to see what would happen, I changed this rule to WeeksIntoQ>9. I tried this in both sims, and could not get either one to run. I started with a start date of 3/31/01, and kept upping the date by 1 week until I got up to 6/30/01. Neither sim could find any stocks to buy. So one would come to the conclusion from this that WeeksIntoQ never gets higher than 9. However, why did WeeksIntoQ<=10 affect the return in one sim by 20 points? This makes no sense. Marco, I'm going to add this into the error section.. Brian |
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gviersen
Advanced Member
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BTW Marco, in updating the stock pages we lost the Most Recent Quarter, Date Last Reported, etc. information that was on the Ratios page before. I have been double-checking the data on other sites since this whole issue arose last summer, but would still like to have that information again in P123. Double-checking is still necessary, however, especially during earning season. For example, in checking the Date Updated field on Reuter.com itself, I notice that Reuters will show the Date Updated to be current when only the preliminary announcement is made. So, revenue and earnings may be updated but not the rest of the variables, while Reuters shows the Date Updated to be current. There does not seem to be a field in Reuters that shows when the full PL, BS and CF statement are updated. That is the detail that seems to take them awhile to update for smaller companies during earnings season. The only time I am 100% confident that the data is updated is when I get a news item from Edgar Online that the financials are in. You can see those news items in Yahoo under Headlines. However, for larger companies, Reuters often has the data in place well before that news item comes out. So the bottom line for those investing in smaller companies is that a little digging is going to be necessary to make sure your buys and sells are using the latest data. Unless Marco can find out more about the updating process from Reuters and find a date variable that shows when the full quarterly data is updated. GV |
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