The Calcbench Insider: September 2016
Welcome back to work, everyone! For those who took a summer vacation in August,
Calcbench has been busy expanding our product lineup and doing more dabbling in financial data research. Whether you're new to our products or looking to learn more about how we can improve your day-to-day, we hope you find the information below useful.
Sign up here for a free Calcbench trial. As always, your feedback is welcome.
Calcbench on the Road!
Say what? You’re going to be at the
American Accounting Association’s Big Data Conference, Sept. 15-16 in San Francisco? What a coincidence—Calcbench will be there, too! Calcbench's Pranav Ghai and Ariel Markelevich will be at the conference to give a presentation and to demonstrate Calcbench’s mighty power. Look for us and say hello.
All the best,
The Calcbench Team
What’s New in the Calcbench Databases
We’re delighted to announce that Calcbench has
improved and expanded our Show Disclosure Pattern feature, which lets you see what disclosures companies are reporting at a glance. You can compare disclosures within a peer group, or compare disclosures from one peer group to another—all of it presented in neat grid format on your screen.
This is a great tool for auditors who might need to compare a client’s disclosures to its peers; or for corporate reporting directors who want to know what your rivals include in their reports.
We have a tutorial on our blog that walks you through how it works.
What else can Calcbench do? Read on…
First we have a look at
how to find and compare key ratios among a group of companies; in our example, we look at return on equity for the largest banks in the United States. (And we show how to convert our data results into a nifty chart you can include in a PowerPoint deck for the boss.)
We also have a post that explores
how you can study geographic breakouts of financial data. We used Apple as our example, but in general you can quickly identify the geographic breakouts for any filer who reports data by regional markets—and yes, we include an example of how to use the Calcbench Trace feature, so you can go from the numbers we display on your screen directly to the actual number a company reports in its SEC filings.
Geeking Out on Data
Which companies are most efficient? Financial analysts often evaluate company efficiency by calculating one of several ratios: return on assets, return on capital, and return on equity. We ran a study to find which companies had the best ratios in all three categories, for the last five years—and found three companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average that fit the profile.
Read more about these uber-efficient titans of Corporate America inside.
Finding the devil in the details: the Hulu example. Calcbench only tracks financial data reported by publicly traded companies—but that can still give you plenty of information about
non-public companies, too. We noticed an item in 21
st Century Fox’s most recent filing mysteriously labeled “the Hulu Indemnity.” The more we pulled on that thread, the more intel we found about Hulu’s growth, operating losses, and potential legal exposures.
Read more inside.
Profitability of health insurers holds steady for three years. Much news has been made lately of health insurers withdrawing from state-run healthcare exchanges run as part of the Affordable Care Act. We looked at revenues and operating income for the 10 largest health insurers that file with the SEC. The numbers are clear: revenue and operating profits rose briskly from 2013 to 2015, and profit margins have held steady.
Read more inside.
Need to Learn the Ropes?
