Properties
Properties are fields of data pertaining to a security. Many of the properties are fields that you would find on an income statement, Balance Sheet, or statement of cash flows, such as Net_Income_1Y, EPS_1Q, or Sales_1Q. Other fields involve price data, unique valuations, company information, Financial ratios, etc. Browse through this page to review all of our properties.
Getting Started With Properties
You should first complete the My First Stock Screener quick start, as we build upon it for this tutorial.
In that tutorial, you finished creating your first stock screener. Here we show it again for reference.
Since this course is about the grammar of the Equihack language, not selecting the perfect stocks, let’s chew on this last entry a little. As it turns out, you could have found the properties you wanted in several ways. Let’s look at some of them.
If you had entered a lower-case “m,” you would have been prompted with 11 purple operator names that start with m: max, min, multiply, minus, median-across, and min-across plus the four black properties displayed when you entered a capital “M” above—15 choices in all. You could have scrolled down to the Market_Cap or pressed the down arrow to it if you wanted, and this would have worked just fine.
If you had entered lowercase “mc,” you would have been prompted with just two choices: Market_Cap and Market_Cap_MR. You want the first choice. It is highlighted. You only need to press Return to select it.
Sometimes you find yourself calling something by a different name than the one used by Equities Lab. Typing in your hunches doesn’t hack it. For example, you call Market Capitalization just “Capitalization.” You type in “c,” and you get a bunch of purple operators followed by properties such as Close, Capex, and Cash that aren’t close to what you want. You keep typing, and when you get to “capital,” all choices disappear. You are frustrated, but not to worry; you have other options.
Look down at the bottom row of tabs. The one on the far left is “Tools.” Click it. The bottom half of the screen now becomes a huge library of tools available for your use. The names of these tools are listed in the left panel. The description of each tool shows in the middle panel as you scroll down across each name. There are three groups of tools: properties, operators, and formulas. You can display the group of tools you want by clicking the icons to the right of the “Filter by” box.
You are looking for a Capitalization property. Click the left-most square icon by the Filter by box to display just properties. Then type “capitalization” in the Filter by the box. Presto, you see the error of your ways! You see it even before you finish typing. You want the Market Capitalization property. The descriptions shown in the middle panel can help sort things out, too. Put your cursor on the desired property name and drag it to the left-most box in your screener statement, and you are done.
Don’t like one of the four ways to enter a property described above? Let’s look at a few more:
- Put your cursor in an empty box. Press Control+Shift+P
- Put your cursor in an empty box. Click it. See a drop-down menu. Select Insert > Insert Property.
- Put your cursor in an empty box. Select Editor (from the top bar) > Edit Term > Insert > Insert Property.
In each case, if the Tools section has been selected previously and is still showing on the bottom half of the screen, the list of available properties will be selected and shown in the first column.
In Equihack, you either “insert” or you “add” things. Inserting puts the choice in the box. Inserting does not add a new box. When you insert, you replace what is there, be it blanks or some previous value you want to replace. This is a little different from most free-form word processors’ use of the word “insert.” Be careful.
Do you remember where we were? We were filling in the second line of our screener, where we wanted the Market Cap to be greater than 70 billion dollars. All that remains is to enter 70,000 in the third box on that line and click the GO button. Our results will show on the bottom half of the screen. This time we will see only a dozen or so stocks selected.
On the top half of the screen, you see the words: “Stock screener; Match all of the following; PE < 10; Market_Cap > 70,000; GO” In your mind, it is correct to read it as “If the PE is less than 10 and the Market Capitalization is greater than 70 billion dollars, select the stock out as the computer reads through the whole file of 7,000+ stock records. Then display the selected stocks on the heat map at the bottom of the screen.”
This happens in seconds. Your Equihack program runs in a Java-based program on your computer. You talk to it at your leisure. When you press GO, the Java program calls the central computer with your request. It goes to work on a high-speed server using a program written in the Python language that you never see to find the information requested. The answer is then returned to your computer, where you can run the many displays available.
Believe it or not, you have come a long way with this first lesson. You learned how to find the blank page, how to create a new screener, enter two tests in a screener, run it, and see the results.
However, more importantly, you have learned more about using the available tools. You know where to find properties. You know multiple ways to insert property names into a test. You know how to put the system to work. All of these steps will become second nature as we go forth with additional functions and options.
Summary
Adding a property by typing
Type in the desired property as it appears in its description.
Type in the desired property as it appears in the editor, then select from the drop-down menu. So for Net Income 1 year ago, it appears as Net_Inc_1Y in the editor, so type in Net_Inc_1Y, at it will auto-complete then you can select the appropriate field.
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Or you can type in the first letter of each word in the property, for instance:
- sg1 → Sales_Gwth_1Y
- mof → Month_of_Year
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By Mouse
Click on an empty box and select Insert, then Insert Property, and the focus will be directed toward the tools tab at the bottom of the program.
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Tools will then have the focus so you can select your desired property
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You may also click and drag a property from the tools tab into the editor and drop it onto an empty box or replace another property in a filled box.
Reference Guide
The properties Guide includes a complete reference of all of our properties.