Thursday, January 21, 2010

Fooled By Yahoo

Signet Jewelers is a retail jeweler in the US and the UK. It looks like a tremendous bargain - until you uncover the facts!

The company trades for $28/share, but has $16/share of cash, trades at a P/B of .14, and generates revenue of $376/share! So what's not to like about this company? Well, all of the above numbers are wrong, apart from the share price.

But these are the numbers that Yahoo! Finance and other sites display for this company. It would appear that one misplaced decimal point, concerning the number of the company's shares outstanding, changes this company from a large-cap into a deep-value small cap!

While we've previously discussed the need for investors to look behind the numbers, it should also be stressed that investors should look at the numbers as well. We've seen before how Google Finance makes both one-off as well as systematic errors, demonstrating the need for investors to verify any data that stock sites provide.

Disclosure: None

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

International companies often show revenue from currencies other than the dollar in Google Finance - I was checking into an Israeli company on Friday and the numbers seemed great, till you dug up their 10Q and realized it wasn't in dollars :)