Excessive goodwill occurs when a legacy company can no longer organically grow earnings so it has to buy other companies (perhaps over paying) to show earnings growth.
Intangibles can make a debt laden balance sheet less negative if the value of "synergy and secret sauce" are over stated and never written down.
You can see GE's Goodwill and Intangibles peaked in 2017 when Jeffrey Immelt got replaced and John Flannery started to do the write-downs for which he was sacked. Larry Culp seems to be doing it more even handedly.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-ge-built-up-and-wrote-down-...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GE/general-electri...
from this year i think, there is something called "expenditure tax" so in case of a p&l statement, if you increase your expenses to reduce NPBT, you pay MORE expenditure tax and vice versa so even this loophole is now effectively closed.
The only thing not subject to interpretation is cash, but you have kind of the reverse problem: most of the time, it's difficult to intepret anything from it... of course, that's why modern accounting was invented. As we say in French: c'est le serpent qui se mord la queue (the snake's biting its own tail).
That said, as someone who makes financial statements for a living, there is a lot of room for "adjustment" if you are determined and even to an extent that while preparing fs, we can just decide if we want to pay less income tax so we can increase expenses by reducing cash and leave the entries to be made by management later just to secure our records
If you're into superinvestor activity like gurufocus, I can recommend something in the same simple, bare-bones spirit as this site (though it is ad-driven). Check out https://dataroma.com
I think the name to be a little odd, though. It's a little forgettable and the meaning is a little unclear. I might suggest trying to think of a different name.
I assume you mean other than the usual suspects ? ;-)
Try IEX Cloud or Quandl, both are quite US-centric although Quandl does have a small amount of international stuff.
But really, for consistent quality and coverage its hard to escape the usual suspects.
P.S. Don't forget to read the small print properly ! Many companies make a differentiation between internal use and publishing on the web for others to consume.
We continously pull their whole dataset in one minute intervals as well as receive real-time feeds for the whole universe over websockets and they haven't complained once.
Example photopea.com
Sucks to add unit test to an existing app on the other hand E2E is nice.
- What's the data source for this ?
- What's the restatement policy of the data display?
- Why the limitations on period types ?
- Any plans to add common size display option ?
Any man and his dog can provide data for US companies, there's a whole world out there and its tiresome to constantly see these US-centric views of the financial wold.
Whilst I appreciate you might claim you're only doing it for launch or whatever, I'd still rather you launched with a wider perspective than just US.