Monday, November 19, 2012

Conference Call Transcripts: Now All In One Place

If you're like me, you find the info divulged on company earnings conference calls to be of great value. At the same time, though, you find most of the call to be a complete waste of time. (e.g. A lot of time is wasted practically reading out what has already been issued in a press release.)

Conference call transcripts, on the other hand, let you speed-through the agonizing legal disclaimers, the repeated sections of the press release, and the answers to questions in which you had no interest. Switching to transcripts from the audio calls themselves could increase your productivity by saving you about 45 minutes per call, especially if you've taken my speed-reading tips to heart.

A problem I've found with transcripts, however, is that there is no single location where you can find them all, until now. There are some sites that publish a bunch of transcripts, like Seeking Alpha, Morningstar and Thompson, whereas others have to be googled to be found. Some companies (e.g. Kirkland's, Dorel) even provide their own. Some sources are free, whereas others charge big money. So to find a company's transcript at the price you're looking for, you have to check all of these sites, google around, and check company pages. If you're looking on earnings day itself, you may have to perform the necessary steps multiple times per day if you're waiting for the transcript to become available, which eats into your productivity gains!

So, I decided to create a website that does all the work in scouring the internet for conference call transcripts, and lets its users retrieve these transcripts by company at the click of a button. No more looking for transcripts across several sites, no more googling, no more navigating through awkward investor relations sites. Just go to http://www.conferencecalltranscripts.org, enter the company name or ticker, and voilĂ , an updated list of the company's conference call transcripts (if they exist) appears.

Of course, the site is brand new so there are bound to be issues. Undoubtedly, the algorithm will need to be refined further so if a company you're searching for is showing strange results, do let me know. Also, please feel free to post here if you've found any bugs or have any comments or suggestions to make the site more useful.

Enjoy!

10 comments:

currygoat said...

Great Job!

hardcorevalue said...

great job Saj! very ambitious, I'll put it on my website and retweet it for you. Do you know programming? How did you build this?

Josh said...

Wow! Great work! Thank you. I tended to just look at morningstar and Seeking alpha and if they didn't have it, I had to just listen to your call (same feelings on listening as time consuming).

Anonymous said...

Thanks Sal.

dgforvalue said...

Great job Saj!

juan said...

Awesome!

Anonymous said...

Very cool... thanks.

Just curious - do you ever pay for transcripts?

- aagold

Saj Karsan said...

Thanks, guys!

@hardcorevalue I knew some already, and learnt some to fill in the blanks!

@aagold Nope, however, I would consider it if the prices were more reasonable...

Anonymous said...

Nice Django Debug page!

Seriously, though, it's currently broken - just so you know.

Saj Karsan said...

Hi Anon, thanks for letting me know. Trying to add some new features, but a bit new to this so some growing pains are inevitable!