I was just wondering why a stock like VEGL doesn’t appear in our database. They’re a $69 million market cap OTC company, so I would assume they’d be in the database. Last time I checked, the criteria for including OTC stocks was market cap over $25 million. Or am I wrong? It makes me wonder what other OTC stocks are missing. Thanks, - Yuval
The short answer is that our Compustat subscription package does not include Vegalab. We would have to contact S&P to give an exact reason.
It may be because it is a thinly traded stock. the last 90 days the average volume is 1,928 shares. At an average price over the last 90 days of about $2.90, there are only about $5,500 traded/day.
Does your Compustat subscription package give you guidelines as to what stocks they include and what stocks they don’t? I think it would be helpful if you can tell us those. The documentation currently on P123’s website says that Compustat covers all OTC stocks with a market cap of $25 million or more. Clearly that’s no longer the case. Thanks!
I just asked them about this. CompuStat’s current criterion is that coverage is automatic at $100 million market cap, but they will consider adding a company at $25 million upon customer request.
They’re regarding my inquiry about VEGL as a request, by the way. They’ll let me know whether it will be added.
Paul, thanks for this. It was my impression (perhaps a mistaken one) that OTC stocks used to be added at $25 million market cap. If now they’re not added unless they reach $100 million, that implies that to get a true picture of the forward data perhaps we should exclude from our backtests OTC stocks with less than $100 million. In other words, the data we’re using may include a lot of stocks that won’t appear in the data going forward.
Currently in the All Fundamentals database are 1278 OTC stocks, of which only 373 have market caps greater than $100, and of which 673 have market caps less than $25. Last year Compustat added TTNC, with a market cap at the time of $29 million, and earlier this year they added MCPI, with a market cap at the time of $14 million. So either something has changed recently or they’ve just been extremely inconsistent about adding OTC stocks. It would be interesting to run a study of the market caps of OTC stocks at the time they were added to the database. Perhaps there’s a custom series way of doing this, but I’m not sure how to write a rule that would capture stocks recently added to the database.
I have no special interest in VEGL, by the way. I was just surprised it wasn’t in our database.
Do I assume correctly that all stocks on the major exchanges are automatically added to the database?
For NYSE, yes. The minimum listing requirement for that exchange is $100 million.
I’ll ask about NASDAQ. I suspect that the answer is also yes, but the requirement appears to be $45 million.
I got the answer. Coverage is without regard to exchange. Just because something is listed on NASDAQ does not guarantee that CompuStat will cover it, apparently. (NASDAQ has a $45 million market cap minimum.)
They also said that they are in the process of adding VEGL and gave me the coming internal database designation. (GVKEY 180925, which means nothing to anyone not involved with the database.) If you notice a stock that’s not in our database that looks like it’s in the market cap range of $25 million to $100 million, feel free to let me know. I’ll ask them to add it.
EDIT: If the company has fundamentals available. At that level, I believe that it’s very possible that the company will be under the SEC small-company reporting rules, meaning that they will report sporadically or not at all.