stale statement flag

FNJN should have a stale statement flag, and should have had one last night. They reported earnings yesterday morning.

Is this sort of delay normal? I really depend on this flag a lot, and when it doesn’t appear I end up breaking my rules for buying and selling. I shouldn’t have placed an order for this stock last night.

Does the stale statement flag work well? If not, what is the best way to deal with stale statement?

If a company reports in the morning or almost immediately after market close, the stale statement flag is almost always picked up by the 11 pm or 3 am update. If a company reports in the morning and there’s no stale statement flag in the 3 am update, that often means that the report has been standardized and processed. But there are also very rare instances when the statement isn’t actually noticed for 24 hours. And then there are cases when the company reports after the 3 am update but before market open.

The earnings calendar is a great help here.

Yuval, just curious what the criteria for “stale statement” is compared to “days late”? I would assume the criteria would be the same.

However, in the R3000 today, 10 stocks have stale statements (=1), but only 4 are in “late” status (dayslate>0) (and 1 is dayslate=NA).

So, I may be misinterpreting what these values are telling me.

Any thoughts?
Thanks,
Ryan

They’re entirely different, really. Stale statement means that an earnings announcement was made but that the data provider has not yet processed it. Days late means that the company has not reported earnings past the requisite time they should according to SEC rules. See https://www.portfolio123.com/doc/doc_detail.jsp?factor=DaysLate&popUpFullDesc=1 for more info about DaysLate.

Ah, ok. Thanks for clarifying.

Yuval, is it safe to assume a stale statement equates to a “wait and see” and a DaysLate equates to a “run for the hills”?

Not absolutely. If DaysLate > 40, then yes, probably so. But some companies have good reasons for filing a few days late.

Yuval, adding this line to my buy rules appears to be fine: StaleStmt=0

But adding it to my sell rules, causes my sim to go from this… to this…

Clearly I am using it incorrectly somehow.

Can you shed some light on this?



Adding that line to the sell rules causes you to sell every stock every week so long as it doesn’t have a stale statement. That would be an insane thing to do, and the backtest reflects that.

abwillingham, I use the StaleStmt=0 flag in my Sell Rules as follows… say I have the following Sell Rule

RankPos > 25

I would just change it to the following

(RankPos > 25) AND (StaleStmt=0)

this keeps me from selling a stock if it has stale data.

Cheers,

Daniel