Dear all,
We have a problem with CashPSQ and CashPSA and potential confusion in what is expected. We have the following line item functions for cash:
Cash - cash excl. Short Term Investments
CashEquiv - cash incl. STI
CashPS - cash per share incl. STI
Do you see the problem? The names are confusing since CashPS returns cash incl STI. But it gets worse…
A while back we released automatically generated factors for every function that generates these factors:
For Cash: CashQ, CashPQ, CashTTM, CashPSQ, CashPSA, etc
For CashPS: CashPSQ, CashPSPQ, CashPSTTM, CashPSA, etc
As you can see there are two conflicts, and the results are ugly. When you use CashPSQ or CashPSA you are cash only. But when you are using CashPSTTM or CashPSPQ you are getting cash and STI.
If you chart them together in the fundamental chart this is what you get. META has around 3x the Cash + STI vs Cash . So it’s a mess. Very sorry about this. We are not sure what the best course of action is.
We think 99% of the users only ever mean to use CashEquiv, so one possible solution is for all of the above to return CashEquiv. And we can introduce a new factor, LiquidCash for example, for users that really want to exclude STI.
Thoughts?
