NATIONAL NEWS - Wikinvest, the stock research wiki, today announced the launch of Wikidata, bringing a new depth of investing insight, for free, to the general public. Wikidata applies the same principles behind Wikinvest, making quality investment information available to everyone, to financial data previously available only through expensive subscriptions or in dense regulatory filings.
"Historically, individual investors have been limited to a tiny subset of the tools commonly available to professional investors," explained co-founder Michael Sha. "At Wikinvest, our mission is to level the playing field and make these tools and data available for anyone who wants to use them. With Wikidata, we're freeing the data, providing access to important information that most investors have been deprived of because it's been too costly or time-prohibitive for people who don't want to wade through reams of regulatory filings or pay thousands of dollars for proprietary research."
While traditional finance portals typically provide basic financial statistics (such as earnings-per-share and price-to-earnings ratios) found on a company's balance sheet, income statement or cash flow statement, these finance-oriented statistics only paint part of the picture about a company. The important data that's missing are the operating metrics that are specific to a company or industry.
For example, the accepted expense metrics for the airline industry are fuel and non-fuel costs per seat mile. If you look at Southwest Airlines (NYSE: LUV), you'll see that their costs are dramatically lower, which explains why they have been profitable since 1973, a record unmatched in commercial aviation history.
These types of metrics, which vary by industry, can be found in publicly available filings, but collating them in a way that lets investors easily view data about a company or compare companies in an industry takes an incredible amount of effort. In the past, research companies have developed expensive subscription services to make the data more easily accessible, even though the data is publicly available. But with the launch of Wikidata, visitors can view all the data on a particular company, an entire industry, or a particular metric, easily and for free.
As part of launching Wikidata, Wikinvest has seeded data on over 1,000 companies, and plans to add thousands more, industry by industry, over the next few months. The first industries to be included are Casualty & Property Insurance, Regional Banks, Home Construction, Hotels, Oil Majors, Independent Oil Companies, Airlines, Investment Banks, Railroads, Restaurants, Oil & Gas Drilling, Oil and Gas Pipelines, Department Stores, Grocery Stores, PC Manufacturers, Discount Stores, Electric Utilities, Diversified Utilities, Gas Utilities, Water Utilities, Newspapers, Application Software, Online Retailers, Oil Transportation, Internet. Wikinvest expects the site to be populated with data from more than 4,000 companies in 150 industries by the third quarter of 2008.
Source: Market Wire