Reading Earnings Reports

I read it and by the way this was my first read of an earnings report

Mykie,

I would advise you that if you are going to invest in stocks you should really, REALLY, should read EACH of the earnings reports of the companies you invest in. What you actually read here was not the Earnings Report, but the transcript of the Conference Call.

There are actually three things:

The Press Release (also called “the Earnings Report”. This is the press release the company puts out in which they give the outline of what they did in the quarter, their revenues, earnings, adjusted earnings, progress during the quarter and financial tables. The basics are important, but there is often stuff that I skim.

Then most companies have a Conference Call in which they give more color on what the quarter was like, and then answer questions from analysts. This is VERY useful. You can tell a lot from the tone and from the questions and answers. You can listen to this live, or go back and listen to it recorded. You can find it on Yahoo Finance or on the company’s investor relation website.

The problem with the recording is that, while you can hear the voices, which sometimes is wonderful, if it was an hour conference, it takes an hour to listen. Thus Seeking Alpha does a transcript of each call. It only takes 10 to 15 minutes to READ. Sometimes though you have to figure out what they said as the guy transcribing it didn’t get all the words right. That’s what you just read, not the earnings report. You can find the transcript on Yahoo Finance, or on Seeking Alpha (but not usually on the company’s investor relation website.

Hope this helps.

Saul

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Hi Saul,

Thanks and for sure your comments helped. I printed them out and will begin reading all.

I did find the transcript incredibly helpful and from that I had a few takeaways of what to watch going forward.

I assume you also read that and would like your synopsis of what to watch for going forward.

Here’s another article talking about Magic Jack’s performance in the marketplace, sent by my friend who is hands on with the device (I don’t own one).

http://www.frost.com/prod/servlet/press-release.pag?docid=27…

So to find these reports you speak of, the best place to get them all is MagicJack’s website?

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Sorry, after writing and sending the last comment I reread your words and saw Yahoo and SA are where I’ll find transcripts.
Mykie

Hi Mykie,

For the earning reports the best place to find them is the company website. The best way to find THAT is to go to Google and put in the name of the company followed by investor relations. (i.e. magicjack investor relations, ambarella investor relations, celgene investor relations, etc)

Here’s the magicjack site : http://www.vocaltec.com/releases.cfm

Note that the above page is only for 2014 (and thus has only the Dec quarter results), but there’s a button at the top which gives you a choice of the year.

What I do is put a bookmark folder on my computer called company websites and keep all the links there so I don’t have to look them up each time, but it’s not hard to look them up either.

For the transcripts of the conference calls you have to go to Seeking Alpha. They are free. Here’s a link that may be helpful. http://seekingalpha.com/tag/transcripts

I found that putting in “CALL conference call transcripts” confused the computer because of the two "call"s. It’s probably better to put in magicJack conference call transcript.

And putting in Magicjack conference call transcript Q3 2013, etc, should work best.

Saul