CreditSights, the leading provider of independent capital structure research, has launched FinancialTracker, an innovative platform for analyzing companies.
FinancialTracker represents the next generation of CreditSights spreadsheets.
Investors increasingly face difficulties using financial data to identify significant operational and financial trends. Despite tighter reporting, financial analysis remains inefficient and clouded by corporate transactions and incompatible data. FinancialTracker overcomes these challenges and provides a platform making numbers a useful component in trading and investment decision making.
"We believe we have created a tool that takes a historically cumbersome process and made it more efficient," says Peter Petas, CreditSights' Co-Founder and Head of Research. "FinancialTracker will allow customers to manage data to meet investment objectives."
Data are extracted from SEC filings and reviewed by CreditSights' analysts. "Unlike downloading financial data from Bloomberg API, I take comfort knowing that analysts that cover these companies have scrubbed the data," says Ben Klaas, of Bank of Butterfield. "FinancialTracker is a user-friendly, true time saving tool."
The new application allows users to create customized financial reports. Other features include the ability to manage portfolios and generate reports comparing companies or across rating and sector averages.
FinancialTracker features industry-specific ratios and information not itemized separately in SEC filings, such as pension and segment data, providing deeper insight into a company's true financial portrait. Annual and quarterly data are scrubbed within two weeks of SEC filings.
Coverage mirrors companies tracked by CreditSights' 50+ analysts, in 30+ industries, including automotive, technology, telecom, wireless, digital media, media, power, oil and gas, retail, consumer, aerospace and defense, commodities, cyclicals, insurance, brokers and banks, and includes the most liquid debt and equity issuers.
FinancialTracker's ability to provide a transparent picture of a company's financial condition is underscored by the intricacies inherent in financial statement analysis today; a process muddled by Sarbanes-Oxley.