Honestly, screening is the lesser of my worries. It might be useful to have a screener, but not hugely useful.
I spend most time on updating spreadsheets with newest data. This is something that would be great to speed up and automate. However, this is also somewhat tough to improve:
- I'd prefer SEC data and not third party provider that may mess up things.
- I prefer to annualize the last 3/6/9 months depending on where we are in the year, which presents some difficulty
- I'm pretty sure that my FCF is not really what data sources call FCF and it's not trivial/easy to automate out of cash flow statement. In most cases, I take OCF and subtract capex and acquisitions.
- Same with debt minus cash (e.g. I add pension, postretirement benefits, leases to debt)
- I do change spreadsheets occasionally. Since I have a spreadsheet for each of 700+ tracked companies, I'd have to update them all for any automation (or at least the older ones).
- For some companies, I prefer to enter data as soon as it's news-released, which means that there is no SEC data available yet. It would be good (but not essential) if any automation could work around the fact that I may have entered some of data manually.
Anyway if you (or someone else) have great ideas, I'm all ears. I am unlikely to move to Google docs though (one reason is that AFAIK Google docs chokes on large docs and/or large collections of docs), so any solution should be Excel spreadsheet based. I can send a sample spreadsheet to show what's in it (with all the complexities annotated ;)).
And this all does not even touch international companies, where automation is a dream... ;)
But, if I were to spend time on programming/automation, I'd spend it on automating updates and not on trying to create a screen for my approach. :)
Should I post the remaining 100-36=64 companies when I have time to review them? :) |
