Saturday, July 17, 2021

Did you know that you can do a few simple things to use text analytics in Calcbench?  Of course you know about the search functions of our website which allow you to search subsections of documents like various disclosures, aka footnotes.  You can pinpoint search only disclosures that you want, so you could, for example, look at a handful of Fair Value disclosures for a subset of banks and ignore the rest of the document.  

Today, we are going to extend the concept of disclosure search by using our Excel Add-In to look at text from Earnings Press Releases.  The spreadsheet here allows you to pinpoint search for a term within an Earnings Press Release and count the number of instances of the item.  

Specifically, this case searches a press release for the Frequency of the word “Inflation”.  You can also compare the frequency of the term to the document that appeared a year ago.  If that appeals to you.  In the spreadsheet, please notice that in ConAgra’s Earnings press release (from 7/13/21)  the word inflation appeared 16 times (in the first 32.7 K characters of the 8-K, Item 9.01 document).  

For other document sections that you might want to use, see this list.

As a Calcbench user, you can certainly make this spreadsheet better or if you are really into working with text analytics, use our API to connect to the data repository yourself and write your own ( ahem… BETTER) version of the tool.  

Thanks again and enjoy the earnings season!

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