There have been quite a few changes to the PE Chart application. It’s taken a lot longer than I expected when I started this version as my time available has been sporadic, for various reasons. I believe it’s ready to be shared now.
There is a screen capture on Google Drive that shows the changes detailed below. The link is…
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B40ZcniWzxoNLWt5d1Q5UmxJRnc…
Initially, to keep things simple, the earnings data, and later the trades data, were stored in files named earnings.txt and trades.txt and they had to be in the same directory as the application. I believe there was at least one comment on the board that said it would be nice to be able to get to common data from different devices. So, now the files can be anywhere, with any names. Under the “File” menu, the “Open…” option allows the earnings and trades files to be selected. The selected files will be used until new files are selected. These files can now be on a network drive or a cloud-based drive (like Google Drive) so that they can be accessed from multiple devices. There is also a “Current” option under the File menu that will show the files being used. I’ve used .txt as the file extension but it really is a comma separated values format so if you choose to use .csv it can easily be opened with Excel. Not sure why you’d want to but it’s an option. On a technical note that you don’t need to know, the file before was a record for each earnings value report that was symbol,date,earnings. Now the records also have revenue, quarter and year. However, if the data is to be pulled from the shared site (that I’m about to mention) or if there is no earnings data, only the ticker symbol is stored.
Something I consider even better than that is the ability to used crowd-sourced earnings (and revenue) data on a web site created by nevercontent (a.k.a. Neil - and this interaction was his idea and the driving force for this new version). The site is www.1ypeg.com and has been mentioned a few times on Saul’s board. The PE Chart application can pull data from the site or even apply updates to the site. There is a new “Data Source:” value in the data box for the company. It will display “Local file” if data for that company is on your private file or “1ypeg.com” if the data is pulled from Neil’s site. This can be different for each company. The “Change” button is used to switch between the two options. When the data is on the local file, the change button is only displayed if there is data for that company on Neil’s site. If you are using data from your own file and select “Change” data will be pulled from the site and your old data will be discarded…provided you commit that change when you exit the program. Conversely, if you select “Change” when the source is the web site that data will be saved to your file…again, provided you commit the change on exit.
Companies that I know are on the site are AAPL, AMBA, CAMP, CELG, ELLI, GILD, INFN, NXPI, SKX and SWKS.
If the company selected is not on the web site, or if you’ve added new quarterly data an “Upload” button will be displayed next to the “Add” button above the Earnings History table. This button allows you to upload data to the web site. It will only transfer new data and will not replace the entire table. If some data is in error, it can be modified on 1ypeg.com. I wanted to avoid having an entire history wiped out on the site. I would ask that you fill in all financial quarter and revenue data before uploading anything to the web site as missing values would have to be added on 1ypeg.com directly. I have populated the site with a few companies during my testing. There are a few others put there by Neil, or possibly someone else. The numbers I used in all cases were non-GAAP earnings as reported on company press releases.
The Earnings History table now has financial quarter and revenues data. If you enter financial quarter data in the first row the remaining rows will be automatically populated by decrementing one quarter for each row. Revenue numbers can be entered directly into the “Rev” column. B, M and K can be used to represent billions, millions and thousands or the full number can be entered.
Since revenue data is now available there is a “vs. Revenue” check box in the Options window to add a plot to the chart (the red line in the screen capture). There is also a color option for the revenue plot line. Since there is no default ratio for revenues vs. price to set a scale the revenue plot is relative to earnings and the ratio is set to the earliest earnings/revenue amounts available on the chart. So, the two lines start from a common point and then show the relative change between the two going forward.
The “New” button used to bring up a window that allowed you to enter the symbol and earnings data. Now it brings up a small window that only accepts a ticker symbol. This will add the new company to the selection list and display a price chart. The new company will be set up to be on your own file initially. If the company is on 1ypeg.com the “Change” button will be displayed to allow data to be used from the site. If you choose to keep the data on your own file use the “Add” button above the Earnings History table to enter data.
One of the values displayed in the company data box is the 1YPEG value discussed on Saul’s board. I think the label for that value starts as “PEG:”, but if you click on it the label changes to “1YPEG:”. So, you can select the label you prefer. The reason I did this is because 1YPEG is a term coined by Saul and is probably not widely known outside of Saul’s board. PEG is more generic and while it usually refers to a value based on projections going forward, it can also be a trailing value (at least that’s what I read somewhere).
One issue that was discovered with the previous versions had to do with date formats. The dates for the quarterly reports were stored as MM/DD/YYYY. However, if you live in Australia or somewhere else that typically uses DD/MM/YYYY format the program had issues getting the date right because the built-in date parser uses local date format to convert the text to a date value. Now, the program forces the U.S. standard. This does mean that anyone who went through the trouble of changing the date formats will likely have problems and need to convert them to MM/DD/YYYY.
It was suggested that a version number should be part of the application somewhere so people could tell if they had the current version. I’m making this one version 3. The “v3” is displayed in the main window title. I figured v1 was the original, v2 was when trades were added. It’s likely that a fix or two might need to be made and if so the version would go 3.1, 3.2, etc. I had renamed v2 to be PETChart.exe to differentiate it from the original, with the “T” representing the ability to show trades. I partially did that to see how difficult it was to change the main application name. I’ve returned the name to PEChart.exe…and don’t ever intend to go through that renaming process again.
I’ve tried to test it all as best as possible, but it’s very likely I’ve missed something or someone will do something differently than expected and turn up a problem. Just let me know and I’ll check it out. I have not gone to the level of error trapping that would be expected for a commercial application, so ugly crashes are certainly possible.
So, feel free to download the new version from Google Drive using the link below and hopefully get some good use out of it.
https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B40ZcniWzxoNdENqVWhI…
Steve