If you have been using the Equities Lab system in recent weeks, you may have seen a new error that hadn’t appeared before.
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Stock Server Error:Server Error:Cannot compare split ajusted quantities to constants: greater(Close, 444)
Don’t worry! This error message doesn’t mean that the system is down; it simply tells you that there is a split adjusted value in a place it shouldn’t be.
Have you ever input the following line into a screener?
If you have, you’ll need to change that to the following –
What’s the difference?
- Close
- This is the split-adjusted value. When a company undergoes a stock split the value of stock changes, typically by half, and the number of available shares doubles.
If you’re a short seller, then I’d like to introduce you to the Ohlson O-Score. This is a score created by Dr. James Ohlson of New York University, aimed at predicting the financial distress of a company. The Ohlson O-Score is the result of a nine-factor linear combination of coefficient-weighted accounting ratios that are found from financial disclosure statements that are provided by publicly traded companies. Below is the actual formula for the Ohlson O- Score.
Ohlson O-score formula
So, from a first glance it looks very complex, well that’s because it is. For the purpose of understanding what exactly this equation is composed of, let’s break it down piece by piece.…
I’ve been seeing a lot of articles recently that are very focused on the idea, that by purchasing the industry or sector that performed best over the past year you are giving you the best chance at making returns. I’m a little skeptical, but just as hopeful to see whether or not this is a potential new avenue to take in my portfolio.
Here is the base screen for what we want to do. This screener takes each sector and finds the total average change of close over the past year – making sure they have a market cap of at least $1 billion.…
When investing, for every fairy tale stock like an Amazon(AMZN) or Nvidia(NVDA), there’s an equally disastrous stock like MoSys(MOSY) or Gevo (GEVO). To avoid getting into stocks like these, it’s important to look at their failures and analyze them to avoid getting into the next potential train wreck of a stock. Let’s screen for some stocks that have always gone down.
For this screener we used the equation [always ((change of close over 252 days) < 0 ) within 752 days)] To simplify that equation, it basically means “screen for stocks that have consistently declined every year for 3 years. Only 7 results were shown, so let’s take a look at a couple of these companies’ history and see where it all went wrong for them.…
Just how telling are red flags?
The term “red flags” is synonymous with “bad things are going to happen,” and, for investors, they are a sign that you should likely stay away from that investment. However, all this talk of red flags being able to predict that a company is going to do poorly makes you wonder, does it work?
To start, let’s take the red flag score from the “Synopsis with Red Flags” tear sheet which contains 13 different comprehensive red flags. I apologize for the size of the following photo.
Without getting into too much detail, in the event you can’t read the photo clearly, the score looks for the following thirteen items –
- Bad Accruals
- Current Accrued Expenses are increasing faster than expenses
- Two bad days in a row with a 4.5% drop in share price each day
- Close has decreased over the past 20 days
- The company has a low Cash Flow score
- The company has a low Piotroski F-Score
- Outperformance while EPS 1Y is decreasing
- Average market cap is in the top ten companies
- RawClose is less than $2/share.