Thursday, July 23, 2015

Automated Scuttlebutt

In addition to receiving alerts when companies in your portfolio issue filings or have transcripts, you can now receive alerts whenever a webpage related to your company is updated. There is now a 3rd category of notifications available in your company portfolio on conferencecalltranscripts.org. It's called "Other", and you can use it to track anything from company presentations to 3rd party data about the company, or even to see if there have been changes to a company's job board. For this reason, I call it "automated scuttlebutt".

Here are a few examples of how it can be used for a few companies I have recently discussed on this site:

- Senvest Capital publishes monthly data on the performance of its hedge funds. They don't issue a filing about it, and yet it can sometimes be material to the company's results. By tracking the page that publishes their results, however, you can get notified when they publish new info, rather than having to refer back to the page all the time.

- Dover Downs Entertainment has to report its monthly take to the Delaware Gaming Commission. Between quarterly reports, this can give you an idea of how revenue is trending. Since you don't know when the data will be published every month, this would require a lot of refreshing, but now you can get notified whenever there's an update.

- Alloy Steel doesn't file with the SEC because it is an OTC stock. But it does release financial info. As such, you can receive an alert when its info gets published.

- Berkshire Hathaway's Chairman writes a popular letter every year. Get notified when it happens.

These events can already be subscribed to on conferencecalltranscripts.org by clicking the checkbox beside the website in question once the company is in your portfolio. But the real power behind this feature is the ability to add your own websites to track. To do that, all you need is a name for it and the URL you want tracked! Once you add the URL, you will receive notifications whenever that site has a change, as long as you continue to subscribe to that URL.

As always, please let me know if you experience problems, have questions or have suggestions to improve the site.

Thanks!

4 comments:

Michael Wu said...

That is a nice feature. Many thanks!

Andy said...

Dear Saj,

Loved your work. I have 2 questions that I would like to ask:

1. I tried to key in Dover Downs Entertainment, and nothing came up in the "Filings" tab.

2. For community banks, what filings will they produce beside 10-Q, 10-K, 8-K...etc, filings that a normal non-financial company would file? What useful information would these other filings provide? Do you think they would benefit your decision making?

Thank you for your time.

Andy

juan said...

Great new feature, Saj. Thanks!

Saj Karsan said...

Thanks, guys!

Andy, I don't know why you're seeing nothing under Dover Downs Entertainment. I see filings under the Filings tab. Are you sure it's the right company? When I key in "DDE" only one company shows up. Let me know more details of the problem if you want.

Regarding banks, I'm not much of a bank investor. You can probably Google this question though as I'm sure others have tried to ask and answer it.

Saj