I’ve been experimenting with Quora, the new Q&A site that has been getting a lot of buzz lately. Recently, a question came up:
“Which web site gives the previous 10 years earnings of a public company?”
As value investors, looking at a company’s financials for the past ten years provides a nice overview of how the business performs during the ups and downs of the business cycle.
By using these averages, it helps smooth out one-time events and usually results in a much more conservative analysis – the hallmark of many great value investors.
My answer, reprinted from Quora:
While the SEC Edgar database is the time-consuming method, it is also the most accurate, and the only source I would trust if I was truly looking for thorough due diligence.
However, there are several other sources for historical financials:
MSN – http://moneycentral.msn.com – MSN provides 10-year financial summary information, but the summary is missing many key pieces (such as cash flow information).
SmartMoney – http://www.smartmoney.com/quote/… – Enter stock quote, click on financials, then change to the annual option (income statement, balance sheet, or cash flow statement). Must toggle between 5 years at a time and can’t export.
ADVFN – http://www.advfn.com – One of the most comprehensive sources of information, ADVFN provides financial statements that often cover a date range as far back as the EDGAR filings (1993 for many stocks). Search for a stock, then click on company information to find a host of ratios, charts, and links to the annual reports. However, you are limited to seeing a 5 year period at one time.
GuruFocus – http://www.gurufocus.com – Search for ticker symbol, click on 10-Year Financials. Provides single-page view of last 10 years AND last five quarters. Export to excel option is only available for premium members ($250/yr)
Morningstar – http://www.morningstar.com – Search for Ticker symbol, click on Financials. 10-year financials are only available for premium members ($185/yr). However, the export to excel option is available for the past 5 years of financial information. IMO, the cleanest and fastest export option with nicely formatted information.
SMF Excel Plug-in – http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/… – My personal favorite by far, this free excel plug-in allows you to build your own custom spreadsheets to pull updated information using over 14000 data points from various financial websites. 10-year financials, insider ownership, valuation ratios, etc. Requires some excel knowledge. For true flexibility and power, it’s hard to beat.
Personally, I spend most of my time in EDGAR but these other options can provide a provide a quick signal that further due diligence is required.
While the SEC Edgar database is the time-consuming method, it is also the most accurate, and the only source I would trust if I was truly looking for thorough due diligence.
However, there are several other sources for historical financials:
MSN – http://moneycentral.msn.com – MSN provides 10-year financial summary information, but the summary is missing many key pieces (such as cash flow information).
SmartMoney – http://www.smartmoney.com/quote/… – Enter stock quote, click on financials, then change to the annual option (income statement, balance sheet, or cash flow statement). Must toggle between 5 years at a time and can’t export.
ADVFN – http://www.advfn.com – One of the most comprehensive sources of information, ADVFN provides financial statements that often cover a date range as far back as the EDGAR filings (1993 for many stocks). Search for a stock, then click on company information to find a host of ratios, charts, and links to the annual reports. However, you are limited to seeing a 5 year period at one time.
GuruFocus – http://www.gurufocus.com – Search for ticker symbol, click on 10-Year Financials. Provides single-page view of last 10 years AND last five quarters. Export to excel option is only available for premium members ($250/yr)
Morningstar – http://www.morningstar.com – Search for Ticker symbol, click on Financials. 10-year financials are only available for premium members ($185/yr). However, the export to excel option is available for the past 5 years of financial information. IMO, the cleanest and fastest export option with nicely formatted information.
SMF Excel Plug-in – http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/… – My personal favorite by far, this free excel plug-in allows you to build your own custom spreadsheets to pull updated information using over 14000 data points from various financial websites. 10-year financials, insider ownership, valuation ratios, etc. Requires some excel knowledge. For true flexibility and power, it’s hard to beat.
Personally, I spend most of my time in EDGAR but these other options can provide a provide a quick signal that further due diligence is required.
Feel free to check out the other answers to this and other questions on Quora.
P. S. – Jae’s spreadsheets from OSV pull in ten year financials automatically, in addition to performing tons of other valuable calculations. I spent weeks tweaking my own spreadsheet using the excel plug-in above – the OSV offering is so much better!
See my spreadsheet review for further details.
You might want to take a look at http://www.rocketfinancial.com The data there can’t be exported into Excel, but for US equities it’s as comprehensive as you can find: 10 year+, segmented financials, and industry-specific and company-specific datapoints.
Valuehawk,
Thanks for the suggestion. I’ve used RocketFinancial before and especially like the layout. It also ample information including investor presentation and insider ownership all in one place, but no excel export as you mentioned.
However, I’ve found that it lacks financial information for many of the OTCBB and PinkSheets stocks that I focus on (missing info for TPCS, DIT, ELST etc). which makes it tough as a go-to source for many of the companies I’m researching.
You actually can find the financial for these OTC stocks on Rocket as well. The ticker symbols weren’t being set properly before making them harder to find, but this has been fixed and they can now be easily accessed. Take a look!
Many public libraries have access to Morningstar’s premium information. Often you don’t even have to go to the library, you just have to go to the library’s website, enter your library card number, and then click a special link. I’m able to get both Morningstar and Value Line from my local library: http://www.santaclaracountylib.org/database/subjects/business_rpa.html
Jeff,
Wow, nice suggestion. Is the information up-to-date (i.e. basically pulling it straight off Morningstar’s website?)
Exportable to excel?
If so, could be very exciting…
Yes, the information is up to date and exportable to Excel. The library website is run directly by Morningstar at http://library.morningstar.com. If you go to that URL directly it’ll give you an “access denied” message, but if I click on the special link provided by my local library, then it redirects me there and lets me in.
Jeff,
does santa clara county library still allow you to pull the data? I also have a library card but when i tried accessing morningstar and valueline neither one worked. thanks.
Nice links ! They are appreciated !! 3/5 years is not enough and all I could find til I found this page and now I have free 10 year financial data !
I recommend Mergent Online, which is provided by most major public libraries. It has actual line items as reported, so no funny adjustments like FactSet and CapitalIQ sometimes sneak in there. I’m looking at George Risk (RSKIA) right now, and I am able to get financial data from Mergent back to 1987 (it varies from company to company). It’s also easily exportable to excel, though you’ll need to clean it up quite a bit.
Not free, but I recommend either http://www.financialcontent.com/support/documentation/historical_data.php
or Xignite
Another suggestion is 9W Search. This is a financial reporting website launched by the founders of Edgar Online. They only have 3 years for free (you need to register) and 5 years for paid subscribers. But they have super fast reporting tools. It’s pretty cool.
I came upon this new service by a company called Robur Investment Resources where you can access and compare 5 year company financial data
It is paid for, but at $15 a month it doesn’t seem too bad, and they cover global stocks. Think the website was http://www.roburir.com
Avoid http://www.advfn.com. I was following their site for few years.Problem is that some quarters are missing, other data is just wrong (comparing it with EDGAR), some quarters are duplicated. I had to check every bit of data, since all my investment decisions is based on it. I sent them a bunch of mails to point mixed up data but nothing happened (no reply and financials remain unchanged).
I recently stumbled into this kind of a product: http://myroadtohalfamillion.blogspot.fi/p/blog-page.html
It seems to provide data for the last 26 years for US stocks. It’s not free but much cheaper and extensive than any other product I have managed to find.
You can download any financial statement in excel format for free from http://www.publicsecurities.com
The catalogue of historical statements is growing all the time, and should cover 10 years back very soon. HTH.
I’ve been doing cash flow analysis on dividend paying stocks for years. I specifically want at least 10 years of data from the Statement of Income and the Statement of Cash Flows. Morningstar’s Premium I’ve found to do the best job, as I can copy/paste the raw data….say, the most recent 10 quarters of Revenue or CFFO…directly into an Excel SS I have set up to receive it. Not sure how they do it, but the horizontally arranged data once copied will then paste vertically into the SS, maintaining its format.
Using my local library’s access to Mergent is nice because I can get 15 years or 15 quarters of data, but I don’t use it for 10 years/quarters, as it takes too much time to log-in, set up the report, download it to Excel than copy/paste the raw data into my SS. I also like Mergent as it gives the full EDGAR statement rather than truncating multiple lines of expenses/revenues in an “Other” category.
My only complaint with M* is sometimes their small numbers…say, interest expense…get truncated to zero or just not reported.
ADVFN will leave out big blocks of numbers. I used to use gurufocus, but it cut its 10 years of free data down to 5 years and their annual subscription is about $250, more than M*’s $185. I also don’t do the Yahoo-Excel download as it gets a bit invasive for my taste.