Newbie asking newbie questions, help please

Hello,
I literally just opened an account yesterday and I’m trying to put together my first screen, but I’m running into a couple of issues.

  1. How to insert EV/EBITDA
    I realize it’s a custom formula, but I’m really lost

  2. How to insert shareholder yield
    Same issue

  3. Stock price
    Literally the price of the stock…I can NOT seem to find it in the wizard or free form rules.

Apologies in advance for these very basic questions, but thank you for your time.

Naveen - Portfolio123 can be quite intimidating when you first start but it gets easier as you learn. Here are some answers:

(1) In order to use the screener you should set rules that filter stocks. As a rule you could enter EV/EBITDAQ < xx, where xx is some number used to filter out stocks that have higher EV relative to the last quarter’s EBITDA. You will see a common theme or naming convention involving the last letters of many stock factors. If the last letter is Q, then you are using the last quarter’s results. If the last letters are TTM, this means Trailing Twelve Months. So the formula could be EV/EBITDATTM<xx, meaning that the EBITDA is for the most recent 12 month period. A is for annual, so EV/EBITDAA, means EBITDA from the last annual report.

(2) There are two yields, one is the earnings yield (EarnYield), the second is the dividend yield (Yield).

(3) The last stock price is Close(0). The previous day is Close(1).

BTW - you can find stock factors by going to the help (or within the screener), and type what you are looking for into the search field. For example, if you tye “price” into the search filed, all factors with “price” in the name will be shown. In this case you will see “Price OHLC” as one of the entries.

I hope this helps and don’t be shy about asking questions. There are lots of people here who will help.

Steve

Hi Naveen,

In addition to Steve’s answers above,

#2) By ’Shareholder Yield’ I believe you are talking about the O’Shaugnessy formula. His concept was to estimate the return to a holder of a stock by adding the dividend yield to the percentage amount of share buybacks by the company. In this context, Shareholder Yield can be created as a formula like this:

(Yield+((SharesPYQ-SharesQ)/SharesPYQ))

A dividend yield of 3% plus a 2% share buyback last quarter would result in a theoretical return to a holder of a stock of 5%. This formula does not take stock price appreciation into account.

#3) Another way to place a stock’s price into a screen is to use Close(0), which is the last closing price. Close(10) would have been the close 10 business days (bars) ago.

Make sure you review the Tutorials (https://www.portfolio123.com/doc/tutorials.jsp) and other assistance provided in the Help menu. You can also do a search for factors/formuals you are looking for in each section of the site, e.g., Ranking Systems (under ’Tools’), Screener, or Simulations (under ‘Portfolio’). The Search feature is accessed via the magnifying-glass icon.

Good hunting!

Thank you Steve and IntelligentValue!

I’m now trying to understand the difference between the Universe selections: 1. All Fundamentals - USA and 2. All Stocks - USA

Is there any explanation somewhere that I can reference or can you briefly explain?

lenteank, the tutorials can be of help, and for a full picture, have a look at the A to Z Guide to Portfolio123 under the Help/Tutorials section.

letnak,

I understand you just cam aboard and have ideas you’re excited about using. But can I suggest you step back a bit and click the orange Help icon you see when in the screener (and other parts of the site), and check the slide presentations. The idea is to walk a complete novice through the process of doing things on the platform. They don’t necessarily cover everything (this is a big, powerful platform, as you’re probably already seeing). But they can really get you up and running incredibly quickly and give you a chance to learn the rest at your own pace.

And, of course, keep dong what you did: Ask questions.

Thank you Marc and by the way, this really is a great program. The more I learn, the more I appreciate what’s been done here. I tend to ask a lot of questions in the beginning to figure out where the resources are located to then access them on my own. Thank you for all of the resource suggestions?

Just from a cursory look, I can’t seem to locate what All Fundamentals - USA means; where can I go to learn that?

lenteank,

As of today, P123 contains data on 9108 stocks in the All Stocks - USA universe. there are 6636 stocks in the All Fundamentals - USA universe. The difference is stocks that are mostly pink sheets, or those that are thinly traded, or not listed on a main exchange, and do not have all the fundamental data in the data base. They will have very many NAs for many factors.

Ah, got it, thank you for that clarification.

So with All Fundamentals I don’t need to create a custom universe that excludes OTC and illiquid shares, correct?

Lenteank,

You’ll certainly want to filter ‘All Fundamentals’. Depending on your objective, liquidity WILL still need to be a consideration. Also, OTC by my count in All Fundamentals is 1698 as of 5/12/15 data. ADR’s total 477. Putting the two filters together yeilds a universe of 4607 stocks. From there, if you only are interested in stocks with more than $200k average per day over the last 20 trading days, that leaves you with 3840 issues.

Here are the universe filters to get you started:

Universe(NOOTC) //eliminate least liquid stocks
Universe($ADR)=false // no ADRs
AvgDailyTot(20) > 200000

You might also consider:
EqTot(0,QTR) > 0 - this yields only stocks with positive equity.

I saw from other threads that you created a O’Shaughnessy Portfolio, which is basically what I’m trying to do as well. I’m seeing it as a practice model, not necessarily the best out there, but a way to get my feet wet.

How should I be limiting the All-Stocks Universe? What did you use?

Most p123 members don’t use ‘All Stocks.’ It contains a lot of stocks that are too small and have many NA’s in their quarterly reports. If you use ‘All Stocks,’ you will likely be dissapointed in your results. As mentioned previously, to get started use ‘All Fundamentals’ and you should even screen out the riff-raff in it by using rules such as Universe(OTC)=0 and AvgDailyTot(50)>1000000. Many use AvgDailyTot much lower than my $1M example, but you will need to experiment with this parameter extensively to get the kind os stocks that are right for you.