OK, I have just written a very large check to renew our access to peerless, top-quality earnings data, and I’m here to bitch about it make plain why I’m making this investment. The organization to whom the check is made is Wall Street Horizon, which describes itself as follows:
There are many data vendors out there. Let me tell you a secret: many of them have absolutely crap data. Trust me on this. I’ve been deeply involved with financial data since 1987. There were problems back then. There are the same problems now. There are countless errors, and they don’t get corrected. And why is that?
Because you don’t notice.
And that’s why writing this check again is such a teeth-gritting experience for me. Because the fact is that I could get earnings data from a different vendor for almost free, and…………..you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. You’d just trust that it was correct. And you’d be wrong. Plus, you’d be misled.
See, there’s a lot of information on the site which depends on earnings dates. It seems like trivial data, but some of the most important information and calculations are based on the accuracy of this data. So if the data was the same cheap crap that most websites use – – and, again, trust me, people naively assume it’s correct, even though it’s absolute garbage – – then you would cheerfully look at the earnings calendar, the “E” symbols in SlopeCharts, the fancy-pants modes in SlopeCharts which show behavior around earnings, and all the rest of it, and you’d be using bad information.
But that’s not going to happen, because I’m going with the best of the best. They don’t state “institutional investors” right in the first sentence by accident, you know. This is top tier information.
Over a year ago, when I was choosing a vendor for this information, I looked at a bunch of them, and my jaw dropped on the floor with just how BAD everyone else’s data was. WSH was the only one that passed muster.
My point is, if I’m going to spend this kind of money, based more out of moral obligation than business reality, I’m at least going to crow about it. Feel free to join the ranks of the premium members if you’d like help shoulder the collective load.
