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I was noodling around to find some company financials and in the process found a site called simplywall.st, and as a couple of examples, here are its pages for BRK
https://simplywall.st/stocks/us/diversified-financ...
and for DG
https://simplywall.st/stocks/us/consumer-retailing...

At first look, I like it (except for the blobby thingy they call a 'snowflake'). Sure beats looking at a table of numbers. If you're interested, explore down the page. Seems like a nice presentation of current and past financials (although I'd prefer 10 years of data for everything as well as ability to download). If you have some other site you like, please mention it?

Now for the blobby thingy (snowflake): it's nice that you can mouse over, click, and drill-down inside it. But am I missing something? Why's it a blob?

My understanding is that they've got five attributes that they're representing graphically as pieces of a pie: Value, Future, Paste, Health, Dividend. Each attribute has six things that get scored as 1/0, then they add the six scores to determine the size of the radius of each wedge/attribute. The maximum size is therefore 6 i.e. a full pie (yum!) would be score=6 in each of the five attribute/wedges. IIRC, the blob color is determined from adding up all the scores.

Anyhoo, the wedge seems superfluous to me, isn't all the info is in the five axes of the pie. And if that's the case, why a pie-blob at all why not just five spokes out from the center? And if that's the case, why not a standard five-bar barchart (can color the overall chart if you like)?

So, this post has three points:
1) I found this site, it looked pretty nice, so seemed worth sharing to see what others may think
2) Do you know of other nice sites?
3) Am I missing something, what's with the blob/snowflake thingy, can't you just use a bar chart?

I guess the problem is that it's a quirky but cool way to display information, but that much of the information is not knowable, at least not without a deep understanding of the firm rather than a data feed.
If you trusted the things they're presenting, it would be nice.
But I'm not so keen, given that Berkshire's "Earnings are forecast to decline by an average of 44.1% per year for the next 3 years"

Jim

Yes, I saw that and was of course surprised.

I'm not so much interested in their forecasts, or whether their blob should be used as sort of a visual screener for stocks (actually, they explicitly deny that it should, OTOH, they seem to hang their hat on that hook).
My interest is in some website, if someone knows of one, where corporate fundamental data is presented as more than a table of numbers, i.e. presented visually with some logical drill-down ability and with some history e.g. 10 years. Depending on the price, I'd pay for downloads of historical data. Even if they have a quirky blob representation of the data, or whatever, I could live with that if it was easily navigable (I'd just mentally discount the fluff as "Oh, those are the blob guys, if it looks interesting or alternatively if it looks weird, then dig deeper, you might learn something".

Try https://www.macrotrends.net/

Thank you. The raw historical data is useful.
I'm also looking for nice interactive tools for analysis of balance sheets, cash flow, etc.

If you ask me, the point of graphics is to clarify underlying data. This seems to me to fail that test: it is "interesting" without being informative.

I have seen a similar approach taken to unpacking the taste of gin, however, and I'm thinking of doing some serious research on that.

https://theginisin.com/

Baltassar

Loved the gin analogy.

Our daughter brought me some INVERROCHE Gin Amber from South Africa. Very unusual taste. I can't unpack the taste personally - but I keep trying.

www.inverroche.co.za

If you ask me, the point of graphics is to clarify underlying data.

I could not agree more.

The 'radar chart' touches a bit of a nerve with me. It is LOVED by all consultants and over/mis used entirely too much by them. One can completely understand the motivation though. Toss in some radar chart data into any project report out and you are guaranteed to have at least one company executive inspired by a sexy chart they have never seen before. The five consultants on contract will then spend the next hour explaining how the chart should be read and interpreted. A fantastic way to bill additional hours or potentially extend a project to add new dashboard views that will never be used.

I won't continue my rant on constant misuse of pie charts. Just don't do it.

Jeff

Nobody liked the visualization. I called it a blobby thingy and wondered why not a bar chart, mungo, baltassar, bluehorseshoecrab all expressed dislike as well. It's a type of 'radar plot', the following link goes into detail on why such plots can be bad and suggests barchart/lollipopcharts instead.
https://www.data-to-viz.com/caveat/spider.html
That was my gut reaction as well: colored bar charts with mouseover and drilldown capability can be very informative. They did use a type of bar chart elsewhere in their site, but again got carried away.

I give them kudos for trying, in fact they ask for feedback on some of their visualizations, so maybe they'll eventually get it right. I've looked at a lot of other sites now, and all seem to be either oriented to short-term traders i.e. "We put a mess of indicators on a mess of charts for you!!!", or else are excuses for idiosyncratic stock screeners "We'll pick winners for you!!!". The part I did like of the simplywallstreet site was the interactive graphics (not just in the blobby thing that no-one liked) and that they made use of defaults (pre-populations). Admittedly, because the choice of defaults, e.g. for competitors, is automated, then this often won't be right but getting say 2/3 of them right can be useful in sparking ideas. If a site is easy to use, and you can easily change choices to something else, then I'm ok with it.

What I'd personally like to see is a site where you can pull up a company's fundamentals and expore them graphically and in drill-down fashion. Have some reasonable defaults for barcharts that convert the gross numbers to percentages and displays them, but you also have the ability to change the denominator. Show groups of things at once, e.g. hit a "Debt" button and it'll show you graphics for present short-term, long-term, and type of debt etc, then it'll have a button to graph same ver time. Similar for a "Profitability" button, and it'll show you different views of profitability (ROE, ROI, ROS etc). Everything is always customizable so you're not limited to preset defaults, but there always are defaults so you don't have that "writers block, blank page" problem. Maybe you can set up your own profiles for looking at different classes of stocks, e.g. your favorite measures may be different for 'value' stocks compared to growth. Have defaults for competitors, but with ability to change them. Ability to graph fundamental ratios over time, e.g. 10 years and you're started off with some reasonablbly informative set of defaults that are easily changed. Ideally, downloadable data -- but the data vendor might have issues with that.
I think I'd keep a screener as a totally separate tool and not integrated: use your favorite screening tool (of which there are many) or otherwise come up with a shortlist of stocks that you want to examine in great detail, and then use this tool.

I'm surprised I haven't found a site like this yet. But maybe one is out there.

Our daughter brought me some INVERROCHE Gin Amber from South Africa.

That does sound interesting.

I'm not much of a gin drinker but did have the opportunity to do some taste testing when I was in the Cape Town area a few months ago. The juniper in the typical gin is something I don't care for very much. The 'Rosewater Gin' at Wilderer was a completely different experience and very light.

https://wilderer.co.za/

The Western Cape is full of excellent wineries with a rich history of French influence. My trip was brief but I would love to go back and do a week of wine tasting around the area. The USD/RAND exchange right now makes it very affordable. I don't think I paid over $8USD for any 3-4 glass wine tasting and at least one included fantastic chocolate pairings.


Jeff

Try this one: https://www.gurufocus.com/stock/OXY/summary

(Free registration required.)

Scroll down a bit, and you get graphics showing how the earnings, balance sheet and cash flow statements can be graphically summarized.

dtb

Interesting, thanks!
The graphics lower down on the page that break down the income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statements are pretty neat.

There's a lot of information on the page, but it's all in one big splodge of stuff. It's still surprising to me that there isn't some (by this point, basically industry standard) interactive graphical analyzer for company financial statements. It'd have some minimal, reasonable, defaults to give you a quick overview, and then you could dive deeper using some intuitive UI. Perhaps $20K/year Bloomberg terminals have such a thing, surely sell-side analysts aren't looking at raw 10-k, 10-q forms.

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