We here at CVI expect that individual investors realize they have an information disadvantage compared to Wall Street Inc. analysts, but you cannot quite appreciate how much of a disadvantage it is until you actually use Capital IQ or a Bloomberg terminal. Sure, individuals can call Mr. Bloomberg to get access, but adding the subscription cost overhead of $10,000-30,000 is a real drag on a small portfolio! Yahoo Finance is neat, but being able to do things like pull up 15 years of full historical financial data on a company instantly is very helpful. TIKR.com is trying to bridge this gap for the small investor by “democratizing access to tools that Wall Street has used for decades to analyze investments”. We spoke with the team and appreciate what they are doing.
TIKR has been working away on creating a pretty great product for financial analysis and news. They are still in beta and you can sign up here - http://tikr.com/CVI We have put together a little preview. TLDR: It is definitely worth taking a look at TIKR if you are an individual investor without a Bloomberg terminal in your home.
TIKR.com Demo
TIKR provides key info on 50,000+ companies powered by S&P Capital IQ, such as:
Company overviews
Detailed financials
Call transcripts
Other info like public filings/ownership/etc
After you log in, here is what the homepage looks like.
As an example, we are using Berkshire Hathaway, that company we wish we bought class A shares of 50 years ago.
For financial analysis it is pretty snazzy. They have access to data that gets you up to 15 years or so of historical financials depending on the company. As shown below, you simply move the sliders are to get the periods you want in the format you want.
On top of generating the standard income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statements, there is also a section for ratios.
You can export it to Excel with the click of a button. We spend a ton of time in Excel making models and fancy graphs, and this is a great way to get the data in. It is also consisted and uniform, so with a few INDEX MATCHES you could set up a general template to calculate a firm’s Free Cash Flow in your own way for example.
How about charts? Yep! Instead of setting one up yourself in Excel, you can instantly create a custom chart from any of the financial statement lines and other calculations simply by clicking on the ones you want to show and compare. In the example below, I have spent a few seconds to set up a chart of Berkshire’s Total Revenue, Net Income, and Cash from Operations and also the percentage change in share count year-over-year.
There is also interactive stock charting for companies as well.
Innovations! Innovations everywhere!
Subsequent to our discussion with the TIKR team, they added yet another new feature – Tracking Investing Gurus. It pulls together data on publicly disclosed holdings of various funds and companies. Of course, we are huge fans of this and view cloning ideas as an excellent strategy (“it’s like bowling with bumpers”). You can see our full discussion on cloning in general here - http://www.canadianvalueinvestors.com/cloning-investments-101
Keeping with the Berkshire theme, here is what the report looks like. You can reorder columns with the click of a button. Here we have Berkshire’s top holdings.
Sign Up!
TIKR is still running on a free beta and you can sign up here - http://tikr.com/CVI
We wish the TIKR team the best of luck and look forward to seeing where this goes! If you have any feedback or ideas on how to better use this or other great investing tools please let us know by using our Contact Us page.