New Stock Rover Features - Part 1

We have been steadily adding features to Stock Rover V7. This blog post will be the first post of several that will highlight new features of Stock Rover that we think investors will find highly useful. All of the features described in this blog post are available to both free and paid subscribers.

In part one of this blog post series, I would like to highlight three new capabilities that add real power to Stock Rover’s ability to analyze and investigate stocks, and see trends in data that can be vital when making investment decisions. The new features are:

• The Insight Dividend Panel
• 10 years of comparative quarterly financial statement data
• Displaying financial statements in terms of % change from the previous period

Let’s take each feature in turn beginning with the new dividend display that was recently added to our Insight Panel. Note that Free and Essentials users can see five years of dividend data. Premium and Premium plus users can see ten years of dividend data. Let’s take a look.

Dividend Insights

The dividend display in the Insight Panel is a great way to analyze the dividend performance of a stock, ETF or fund over time. The dividend display makes it easy for dividend investors to see the yield and the growth of a dividend investment generates over time. And for stock, the safety of that dividend via coverage and payout ratios can be ascertained as well. Let’s take a look using Microsoft (MSFT) as an example.

To get to this display Select Insight from the grey function selector on the left and then select the Dividends tab.

The image below shows the same dividend display for Microsoft with red highlights for the key aspects of the display.

The graphical bar chart with the price chart behind it makes it easy to see how Microsoft is growing its dividend over time and how the stock price has correlated with the divided growth. You can also see the dates and amounts of previous payments and upcoming dividend payment information. Finally the display includes statistics on growth, payout ratio and divided coverage so you can get a sense of how safe the current dividend is and how much it is likely to grow in the future.

If you like the income stream that dividends provide, this new display is an invaluable resource to help you evaluate the right dividend stocks, ETFs and funds for you.

Comparative Quarterly Statement Data

We have added a cool new feature to the Statements section of the Stock Rover Insight Panel. You can now compare a company’s quarter vs. quarter performance for a given quarter (Q1, Q2, Q3 or Q4) across 10 years of data (5 years for essentials and free users). The comparison works for the Income Statement, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow Statement.

This new feature makes it very easy to see a company’s performance over time on an apples vs. apples basis. This feature can be particularly useful when looking at companies with seasonal business like Amazon or Macy’s, where the sequential quarters vary greatly. Quarter vs. same quarter for the previous year will give a much clearer indication on how the business is trending. To see this, let’s take a look using Amazon as an example.

If we look at the last 10 sequential quarters of income statement data for Amazon we see that the quarterly revenue mostly rises, but occasionally falls quarter to quarter, with a generally rising trend (the rises are bigger than the falls). So we can see this is clearly a seasonal business.

To get a better sense of how the business is growing, we should focus on the quarter vs. quarter performance for the same quarter in previous years. And with Amazon, where Q4 is their big quarter, we will start there. We do that by selecting the Qtr vs. Qtr Q4 item from the highlighted dropdown list. Here we see the unbroken string of strongly growing quarters and the magnitude of Amazon’s growth becomes clearer.

So Q4’s growth was impressive and that’s their big quarter. Let’s check Q1, to make sure the trend is intact for their seasonally weakest quarter as well. As we see below, the growth in Q1 is also extremely strong. To complete the analysis, we would check Q2 and Q3.

So in summary the quarter vs. quarter feature of Stock Rover illustrates more clearly the growth trajectory of a company like Amazon. This new quarterly comparative feature can really give you a much clearer picture of how a business is performing.

Percentage Change from Previous Period

Stock Rover has added another cool feature to the Insight Statements panel which is the ability to see the statements in terms of the percentage change from the previous period. This is a very powerful feature indeed. So to continue with our Amazon example, let’s look at this feature, again focusing in Amazon’s quarterly sales and Q4. We select this feature by switching from $ to the delta symbol for change as indicated below by the red circle.

The earliest column is the base year and it is shown in absolute terms. All years after that are shown in percentage terms change from the previous period. So when looking at the above screenshot, we can see that the growth in sales quarter over quarter for Q4 is has been at a consistently high level. When the company was smaller in 2008, through 2011, the growth rate was extremely high , hovering around the 40% range, It dipped quite a bit, in 2012, 13 and 14 to as low as 14.6%, still very high on absolute terms, but a big deceleration from the earlier growth rates. But then after that, something amazing happened, the growth actually re-accelerated again, even though Amazon was a much much larger company. That is a party trick that is very hard to do, but somehow Amazon pulled it off.

So with the Percentage Change feature, trends in the data that may be hard to see, become much more visible. The reacceleration of growth help explains the recent spectacular stock performance of Amazon.

So in summary we hope you find these new capabilities in Stock Rover to be powerful additions to your toolkit and that you make liberal use of them as part of your investment research workflow.