Show HN: Free 30-year financial statements visualization
fintopea.comI'm reminded of an analysis I heard about GE from a friend of mine in finance. He said for a while (many years ago) everyone knew the earnings were cooked because the consistent performance was basically impossible, but everyone was making money and went along with it. He said one way they were able to cover their tracks is every so often changing their accounting methodologies enough so that long term comparisons like this were rendered useless for forensic accounting purposes. I find that all very interesting if it's true.
One thing to watch out for - is to look at continued growth of the line item - Goodwill and Intangibles on the balance sheet. Goodwill is when it pays well over book value to buy another company. Intangibles are hard to value assets like IP (a movie library, patents, etc.).
Excessive goodwill occurs when a legacy company can no longer organically grow earnings so it has to buy other companies (perhaps over paying) to show earnings growth.
Intangibles can make a debt laden balance sheet less negative if the value of "synergy and secret sauce" are over stated and never written down.
You can see GE's Goodwill and Intangibles peaked in 2017 when Jeffrey Immelt got replaced and John Flannery started to do the write-downs for which he was sacked. Larry Culp seems to be doing it more even handedly.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-ge-built-up-and-wrote-down-...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GE/general-electri...
Governments do this with deferred compensation schemes like defined benefit pensions and retiree healthcare. There are conveniently no laws around calculating the cost of benefits, and of course no recourse for today’s leaders not funding them in the first place, so they can hide a lot of today’s labor costs in understated pension and retiree healthcare liabilities.
You might enjoy a book called Financial Shenanigans (https://www.amazon.com/Financial-Shenanigans-Fourth-Accounti...). It's essentially examples of detective stories based on financial statements.
I haven’t read the book, but was wondering if you might be able to answer this: is the general theme that companies are able to do this legal thing of changing practices and use it maliciously? And while it might be a well known phenomenon, nobody is actively trying to prohibit it via laws & regulations? the question is serious but also - *Clairvoyance limit test )
look. in india, when someone wants to "inflate sales", they have to pay "indirect tax" or GST on it. at 18%, it gets VERY expensive to do this thing. say you want to double your sales. fine, the government says. just pay full 18% tax on the new 100% sales, which defeats the entire purpose of this. sure, you can increase expenses all you like and the "income tax" law says as long as an expense is actually incurred and is related to business and is not disallowed by law, it is permitted so you can reduce your incometax by any factor but still.
from this year i think, there is something called "expenditure tax" so in case of a p&l statement, if you increase your expenses to reduce NPBT, you pay MORE expenditure tax and vice versa so even this loophole is now effectively closed.
All companies cook their earnings to a certain extent, exactly in view of having a nice, regular, consistent performance... because markets over-react (in one way or another) to anything that is not nice, regular, consistent.
The only thing not subject to interpretation is cash, but you have kind of the reverse problem: most of the time, it's difficult to intepret anything from it... of course, that's why modern accounting was invented. As we say in French: c'est le serpent qui se mord la queue (the snake's biting its own tail).
Yes, but at the same time there are GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles), limiting how much you can change the methodologies, so you can rig only so much.
One of the new laws regarding accounting was daily mark-to-market accounting of assets and investments. $AMZN just took a $7.6B hit due to this ($RIVN write down). So it’s hit or miss. I remember Buffett complaining about this change a year back or so.
Is this the same magic that means microsystems has to take a MtM writedown every time its bitcoin tanks, but cannot do so when it goes up? xD
I am generally pretty pro expecting the MtMing of liquid assets, but very sympathetic to areas where hard to price illiquids are unpleasant
The accounting of "cryptocurrency" is still being developed, but, yes, Bitcoin holdings take an impairment when their value drops below a certain point. This doesn't typically affect cost basis. It may be deducted as losses on a tax return but that might impact cost basis. I've heard from other accountants (a year or so ago, so take this with a lump of salt) that some companies are trying to account for cryptocurrency as inventory, as a "hot asset," as cash equivalents, or as intangibles.
Another trick is constantly buying companies/writing off stuff and abusing "goodwill" to give hard to compare yoy accounts. I can think of a number of companies who did things like that (e.g. Steinhoff) that later got found out (though they did other things too like pushing debt off their balance sheets to patsy companies)
You are right, this is as general as it can get for the initial screening phase for me. I then deep dive into the reports.
Nice. I would love to have a "ratios" tab just for the kicks, NP ratio, gp, stock turnover, working capital turnover, income tax paid ratio, earnings, pbt ratio, pat ratio, depreciation to sales.
That said, as someone who makes financial statements for a living, there is a lot of room for "adjustment" if you are determined and even to an extent that while preparing fs, we can just decide if we want to pay less income tax so we can increase expenses by reducing cash and leave the entries to be made by management later just to secure our records
The corresponding source code seems to be here: https://github.com/RaymondMoay/fintopea
Wow resourceful! I open sourced this to get my first job in code. Gonna private it for now, and consider open sourcing it again when I secure some requirements.
I need to build something similar for my job, so this already gave me couple of ideas. Thank you for sharing this! How did you aggregate all of this data? Did you fetch it from EDGAR? Or do you have a subscription to CapIQ or something?
whoa you built this to get your first job? excellent job!
why make private?
Oh very cool. Not available now. Anyway to see the codebase?
This is amazing! I love that you can plot the data on a graph with 2 clicks.
If you're into superinvestor activity like gurufocus, I can recommend something in the same simple, bare-bones spirit as this site (though it is ad-driven). Check out https://dataroma.com
This is pretty awesome where is the data coming from?
Also curious to know - seems like it's not up to date
As someone who has spent some time looking at some of the more popular alternatives for this type of information (i.e. the top results when googling), I find the simplicity of the UI here pretty refreshing.
I think the name to be a little odd, though. It's a little forgettable and the meaning is a little unclear. I might suggest trying to think of a different name.
Very nice! Where did you pull your data from? Are there any good financial api/datasets out there available for financial data?
> Are there any good financial api/datasets out there available for financial data?
I assume you mean other than the usual suspects ? ;-)
Try IEX Cloud or Quandl, both are quite US-centric although Quandl does have a small amount of international stuff.
But really, for consistent quality and coverage its hard to escape the usual suspects.
P.S. Don't forget to read the small print properly ! Many companies make a differentiation between internal use and publishing on the web for others to consume.
Ok so...what are the usual suspects?
Bloomberg, Refinitiv, CapitalIQ, Factset
Not OP, but I am in charge of engineering and operating a high-performance quantitative algorithm engine at my company and I can wholeheartedly recommend https://polygon.io.
We continously pull their whole dataset in one minute intervals as well as receive real-time feeds for the whole universe over websockets and they haven't complained once.
I am going to say not if you’re running high $$$ boxes. I would not rely on Polygon for anything beyond PA.
I was talking about PA. They have proven themselves very reliable for it so far.
Fundamentals and other information is being pulled directly off NASDAQ etc, of course. Polygon does not offer a lot of data in these regards.
Realistically for $$$ systems you want to have more than one source for every datatype anyway and then aggregate the data yourself.
PA?
"personal account" - vs. the fund(s) an investor may work on as part of their day job
Oh.. I meant price action. But I guess it’s true for both!
How accurate are their fundamentals calculations?
Why?
I get an error when trying to create a custom metric for unlevered free cash flow. "Invalid left-hand side expression in postfix operation"
This is fantastic. Would love to be able to have logarithmic y-axis!
Will do~
Please add logarithmic plots - and IMO they should be the default.
Will do!
Nice site. I'm actually in the process of building almost the exact same type of application, guess I'll have to find a new pet project.
"is ${FOO}topea" a new trend in naming things, a play portmonteau / prtmontrois on "utopia" / "footopia"
Example photopea.com
TIL that photopea is not "Photo Pea"
Just like the naming tbh... it's kinda cute and the domain is available.
This is nice. Reminds me a lot of koyfin before they went pay2play.. now I found myself some other open source tools. Thank you for this!!
I see an E2E test on there, I wonder about this for my own code if it's enough.
Sucks to add unit test to an existing app on the other hand E2E is nice.
Thanks! Made this for myself while learning testing.
Two great features would be calculations of the ratios like P/E, YoY revenue growth, YoY profit growth, and side by side comparison.
Coming right up
This is great! One question: How would you save best the financial statements in the DB?
This is great. For 30 year time horizons, a log plot will be useful
this is super cool. can you share what you use to build the front end? I love the data layout and graph plotting.
Great resource and love the interface. Thanks!
Great tool, thanks for building
This is a nice and handy site!
This is very well done!
very nice. Simple and clean
This is amazeballs!
First questions:
- What's the data source for this ?
- What's the restatement policy of the data display?
- Why the limitations on period types ?
- Any plans to add common size display option ?
Any man and his dog can provide data for US companies, there's a whole world out there and its tiresome to constantly see these US-centric views of the financial wold.
Whilst I appreciate you might claim you're only doing it for launch or whatever, I'd still rather you launched with a wider perspective than just US.
Be the change you want to see in the world.
I mean.. the largest most liquid market in the world is the us equities market.. every foreign investor worth his salt (and his time) spends time researching and ultimately investing in us equities. Not to mention every country has their own accounting/financial disclosure laws so the data will inherently be untrustworthy. Hell even Canadian financials are hard to discern from the American pov given FFRS (or whatever the foreign reporting system is called).
IFRS is used in over 100 countries. Parts of it's implementation are left to the individual countries, but the US is the only country to use GAAP. Every country has some room for individual regulstion of the financial standards of course, but that doesn't make, say, dutch securities less inherently trustworthy than US securities because they don't report on a GAAP basis.