Show me the money People look at net income, otherwise known as just earnings, as well as Free Cash Flow to decide whether they like a company. Why? Net income is the “real” income the firm makes, but it has one weakness: it doesn’t actually track money coming into (orRead More
Introduction The S&P 500 has performed spectacularly over the last seven years. So spectacularly, in fact, that some find its performance hard to believe. Are the stocks that make up the S&P being cherry-picked to only show the most successful performers? If the contents of this benchmark are not selectedRead More
O’Shaughnessy’s screen focuses on low-cost tickers with small market caps. His reasoning goes that, as small as these companies are, most analysts ignore them. This lack of attention suggests that there quite a few diamonds in the rough within microcap stocks. Is he right?Read More
A common theory is that a company making money will outperform a company that doesn’t. Is that really true? I am here today to test how companies that make negative money or no money do compared against the S&P 500. The graph to the right shows a screener with companiesRead More
Tyler has worked with us for about 4 years: doing anything that needed doing. From testing (tedious but critical) to creating new strategies that manage risk and optimize returns, to writing articles (137 of them!), handling customer issues and more. He has also created much of the course work thatRead More
After four years it is now time for me to move onto the next chapter. My time here at Equities Lab has been fantastic, and I’ll still be around posting articles here and there. But before then I’d like to summarize my experiences here in this article. Since I wasRead More
With all the hype surrounding Bitcoin in recent years due to price fluctuations, it’s been hard to ignore. You hear about it on business news, you read about it on your Twitter feed, and then you hear the word “blockchain”. Blockchain is essentially the technological architecture that supports Bitcoin, butRead More
Equities Lab Learn how to benchmark your strategy versus various benchmarks, ranging from indexes, to stocks and other strategies. Imagine you have a large cap screen Cutting to the chase, imagine you have a simple screen that finds reasonable large cap companies. That screen is literally “import ohlson_o_score < -3Read More
Whenever I’m speaking to people about AAPL they tend to ask the same question. Apple just released a new phone, should I buy into their stock now since there will be an influx of sales? The gut reaction I, and many other people within the industry have, is that theRead More
Portfolio123 has increased their prices, is it time to change? With the recent price increase in the services provided by Portfolio123, it has come to light that many users of their service may be looking for alternatives. We’ve been getting a number of calls these past couple of days fromRead More
What is Active and Passive Investing? To figure out which of these methods fit our investing needs, we first need to understand exactly what they are. Passive investing is assuming that the general market is efficient and that picking your own companies is pointless. Investments typically come in the form ofRead More
Should you be Scared of the Dow’s 1700 point drop? On the fifth of February 2018 the Dow Jones Industrial Average saw its largest single day drop in history. This drop coming off a market sell-off at the end of January has caused many investors to call for the startRead More
Artificial intelligence was once only seen in Hollywood Sci-Fi films, but that narrative is quickly changing. Society is progressively becoming closer with AI, as it is used in things we interact with every day where we may not even realize it. Whether it’s with your Amazon Alexa, Siri, orRead More
A lesson on absolute prices versus relative ones You’ve been referred to this page by something saying “You can’t (or shouldn’t) use Close > 5.00” in a stock screener. Imagine you are looking at a share of GoodStock (yeah, I know that’s a lame name for a fake stock!). ItRead More
Analyzing Apple An Apple by itself Is Apple a stock worth buying? Other people have discussed (at length) its “questionable” product decisions, such as: The touch bar getting rid of Touch Id in favor of using facial recognition Scrapping a whole ecosystem of connectors to push the “Lightning cable” EliminatingRead More
Now, this flag looks incredibly simple, but whenever you see orange text in Equities Lab, it means that there is a deeper formula to explore. Clicking on that formula we are presented with the following – Though the flag itself is simple, the underlying formula is not. Understanding and analyzingRead More
We’ve all heard the old trope that “Cash is King.” Well, in terms of a company it just might be. As part of our Green Flag score we have created a line that requires that a company have a positive operating cash flow over the past four quarters. If youRead More
Highlighting Recent Backtests Even with advanced caching methods and multiple speed upgrades, highly complex screeners still take some time to run over the past 20 years. To combat the wait time – and allow you more freedom to analyze strategies and their underlying companies – we built the “Recent Backtest”Read More
Intuitively, most investors would assume that consistent growth in free cash flow within a company, would result in a high performing stock. Well today we’re going to test out that theory with the “Free Cash Flow Growth Leaders Stock Screener”. With this screener, we’re looking for: · Large and stableRead More
Share Buyback Programs A company purchasing back its shares tends to increase the stock price for a couple of reasons. First, it shows that the firm and its employees are confident in the direction the company is heading. Second, it cuts down on the shares available for investors to purchase,Read More