European micro/small caps - interim months vs MktCap

General
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As you may know I like European equities...
As you may also know in Europe we have two problems:

  • sentiment/earning forecast data is not available (or very limited)
  • ~+50% stocks publish full reports on semi-annual basis, which are available in Factset but in addition they may publish quarterly reports that are NOT available in Factset but may be available to the public.

Ok, so lets assume we can ignore stocks that publish full reports on semi-annual basis. I compared stocks in both groups and lets see what is the conclusion...

I filtered out 'tradable' stocks in countries have a mix of stocks that publish either quarterly or semi-annually.

ExchCountry("DEU, FIN, ITA, NLD, AUT")
AvgDailyTot(30) > 2000 and MedianDailyTot(30)> 2000 and Loopsum("vol(CTR) * Price > 500",10) > 5

Then I gouped them by 'InterimMonths(0)' and calculated statistics related to MktCap (in millions).

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Conclusion: Stocks that publish reports on quarterly basis are much bigger (median, 50%). This is not good for us since we know that the most our profits comes from micro/small caps.

The good news is that there are two relatively large markets that require stocks to publish quarterly

  • Sweden (90% months interim==3) and,
  • Poland (100% interim months ==3).
3 Likes
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Germany is a great small cap market too, but unfortunate they do semi annual reports but only "quarterly statements" (some do quarterly reports), and Factset does not record the statements in their data (or they probably does not pick it up with their interface with the exchange).

It's a shame, most statements is just as good as a normal quarterly report, but the companies has to pay extra to the exchange to have it recorded as a report, so the companies don't.

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I can only think of a few large cap stocks like HSBA and AZN that do quarterly reports in the UK. The vast majority report every 6 months