Question about data

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Someone asked me off board how I came up with the data in this post:

Arista up just 1% from Q4. Worried about it?

Here was the question:

Saul, How do you maintain all this past data. Do you plug this into some excel sheet every quarter or do you get it from some site.

Well, what I do when I start investing in a company, is to go back through at least the last two years (8 quarterly reports) on the company investor relations website, and I pull off the revenue figures, adjusted earnings, cash flow perhaps, and anything else I’m interested in. I don’t read through all the older reports, just pull out the figures I want. It doesn’t take more than 15 minutes for all the past reports. I keep them in grids like this:


2016: xx  xx  xx  xx  =  XX
2017: xx  xx  xx  xx  =  XX
2018: xx              =  XX

and I keep them in pencil on a piece of paper because it’s just SO much easier. A separate piece of paper for each company, and all of them in a manila folder. When I am no longer involved in a company I remove the company’s sheet and put it in another folder which is my inactive folder. I usually keep them for three or four years, so I can look back on them if I think about reentering the stock. Not a lot of work because it’s just a few entries per stock every three months (and I don’t carry 100 stocks :grinning:, thank goodness).

Saul

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Hi Saul,

Do you use the same paper to track buy/sell info, # of shares, cost per share, etc., or use excel for that stuff?

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Do you use the same paper to track buy/sell info, # of shares, cost per share, etc., or use excel for that stuff?

I use Numbers (Apple) rather than paper because it does all the calculations for me automatically.

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Saul, sharing these techniques is super helpful. Might be worth adding to the KB!

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