Using R to Analyze Balance Sheets and Income Statements

Question

I am interested in analyzing balance sheets and income statements using R. I have seen that there are R packages that pull information from Yahoo and Google Finance, but all the examples I have seen concern historical stock price information. Is there a way I can pull historical information from balance sheets and income statements using R?

Answer 1

You are making the common mistake of confusing 'access to Yahoo or Google data' with 'everything I see on Yahoo or Google Finance can be downloaded'.

When R functions download historical stock price data, they almost always access an interface explicitly designed for this purpose as e.g. a cgi handler providing csv files given a stock symbol and start and end date. So this easy as all we need to do is form the appropriate query, hit the webserver, fetch the csv file an dparse it.

Now balance sheet information is (as far as I know) not available in such an interface. So you will need to 'screen scrape' and parse the html directly.

It is not clear that R is the best tool for this. I am aware of some Perl modules for the purpose of getting non-time-series data off Yahoo Finance but have not used them.

Answer 2

The question you want to ask, and get an answer to!, is where can I get free XBRL data for analysing corporate balance sheets, and is there a library for consuming such data in R?

XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBRL) is a standard for marking up accounting statments (income statements, balance sheets, profit & loss statements) in XML format such that they can easily be parsed by computer and put into a spreadsheet.

As far as I know, a lot of corporate regulators (e.g. the SEC in the US, ASIC in Australia) are encouraging the companies under their jurisdiction to report using such a format, or running pilots, but I don't believe it has been mandated at this point. If you limited your investment universe (I am assuming you want this data in electronic format for investment purposes) to firms that have made their quarterly reports freely available in XBRL form, I expect you will have a pretty short list of firms to invest in!

Bloomberg, Reuters et al all have pricey feeds for obtaining corporate fundamental data. There may also be someone out there running a tidy business publishing balance sheets in XBRL format. Cheaper, but still paid for, are XIgnite's xFundamentals and xGlobalFundamentals web services, but you aren't getting full balance sheet data from them.

Answer 3

Hi Ramnath, Taking the last two comments into consideration, you may be able to acquire corporate financial statements economically using EdgardOnline. It isn't free, but is less expensive than Bloomberg and Reuters. Another thing to consider is financial reporting normalization/standardized. Just because two companies are in the same industry and sell similar products does not necessarily mean that if you laid the two companies' income statements or balance sheets side by side, that reporting items would necessarily line up. Compustat has normalized/standardized financial reports.

Answer 4

I don't know anything about R, but assuming that it can call a REST API and consume data in XML form, you can try the Mergent Company Fundamentals API at http://www.mergent.com/servius/ - there's lots of very detailed financial statement data (balance sheets / income statements / cashflow statements / ratios), standardized across companies, going back more than 20 years

Answer 5

I have written a C# program that I think does what you want. It parses the html from nasdaq.com pages. It parses html and creates 1 csv file per stock that includes income statement, cash flow, and balance sheet values going back 5 - 10 years depending on the age of the stock. I am now working to add some analysis calculations (mostly historic ratios at this point). I'm interested in learning about R and it's applications to fundamental analysis. Maybe we can help each other.