A bad try with Spinoffs...

Hi all!!!

I try to play a little with spinoffs, but at the first step my sim is doing weird things.

My idea it’s just to buy the spinoffs that happend the last year, but I suspect that the sim is buying all the companies that have had a spinoff in the past decades, because I have holdings that where created in 1940’s, for instance… and that’s not a spinoff… :frowning:

Just I have one rule:

PastCorpAct ( #SPINOFF , #STATUSOK , 253 ) = TRUE

Anybody knows what’s wrong?



And by the way, since there is a ETF that only buys spinoff, CSD, I expected some similar performance but my sim is very very far away from that:


There aren’t enough spinoffs to meet your ideal leverage specification. Try changing the max position size to 5%.

Hello Primus.

Yes, I know it. But, just I want to get all the spinoffs available, and in order to do that I left a lot of “room” in the sim for them.

Do you think that changes what the sim is going to buy or how it behabe? Just I have one single rule…

by the way…

I did what Primus suggested, the sim changes a little, but still have companies that are not a spinoff.

For instance SERV created in 1929, DOV 1947, or HON 1985…


and… another observation. The sim starts the first buy at 2004. I suppose there is no data of spinoff before of that…??


I’m unclear as to the conflict here. A company that has been around for eighty years can still have a spinoff, and the companies you’re buying have all indeed had spinoffs. ServiceMaster (SERV) completed the spinoff of Frontdoor (FTDR) in October, for example, and Dover (DOV) completed the spinoff of Apergy (AGY) in May.

Hello Yuval.

Thanks for your help.

But I just want the sim to buy the spinoff company, the new one, not the parent. I want only the subsidiary.

For instance, following what you say the sim must buy FTDR and AGY, not the parent companys…

Is that possible?

How can I do that?

Portfolio123 is a quant-modeling platform, screens, ranks based on fundamental, analyst-related and price-related data. . . an all the things we can do based on them.

Not every platform is compatible with everything an investor or trader might possibly want to do. Seems to me you have hit on one example of this.

Spinoffs have nothing to do with fundamentals, analyst or price-related data. To the extent they are databased, this occurs in what are known as “events” databases. While p123 does make efforts to try to dip a bit here (i.e. expected earnings dates), that is not really our wheelhouse and could not become such without us purchasing a completely new and definitely not bargain-priced data license and devoting the development resources necessary to get good things out of it.

What you are trying to do will succeed or not based on how clean the spinoff is (the structures of these breakups come in a variety that can be loved only by attorneys and accountants who bill by the hour and investment bankers who take percentages of the deals) and how quickly the/a new publicly-traded entity can get into the pricing and fundamentals databases we license.

Frankly, the best way to play spinoffs that I can recommend is to set a Google Alert for “spinoff” and follow-up alerts to specific planned spinoffs so you can know when they are completed, at which time you can monitors portfolio123 for when it gets into the database, at which time you add it to a model driven by the Ticker(" . . . .") rule and whatever other buy/sell/ranks you want to use. (Or you can simply do it in the “Invest” section as a manual portfolio based on paper or real-money trading.)

Hello Marc.

Ok, now understood, sometimes you can’t have it all…

Thanks for your help.