How BeStock Works: Data and Methods

Every stock page on BeStock is a mix of market data, arithmetic we do on that data, and short notes written by a person. This page explains which is which, so you can decide how much weight each deserves.

Where the numbers come from

Prices, financial statements, analyst ratings, dividends, earnings dates, short interest and ownership come from a licensed market data feed that we load into our own database. Quotes may be delayed, and financial statements are posted when companies file them, so a figure can lag the latest press release by a day or two. Each stock page shows the time of the last price update near the top.

Our coverage is limited to about 300 large, widely held companies, mostly U.S. listed, plus some large foreign companies with U.S. listings. We would rather cover fewer names properly than list thousands with empty pages.

What we calculate ourselves

• Moving averages use daily closing prices over 50 and 200 trading days. On the five-year chart we switch to weekly bars and use 10 and 40 weeks.
• RSI is the standard 14-day Relative Strength Index. MACD uses the usual 12, 26 and 9 settings, and Bollinger Bands use 20 days and two standard deviations.
• Volatility is the standard deviation of daily returns over 30 sessions, scaled to a yearly figure.
• Performance windows are measured on adjusted closing prices, so splits and dividends do not create false jumps.
• Valuation context compares today’s multiple with the same stock’s own five-year history, and with the median of its industry group.
• Rankings on each page place a stock among all the companies we cover on market value, P/E, dividend yield, distance from its 52-week high and trading activity. They are recalculated as prices refresh.
• The “at a glance” summary is assembled by software from the figures on the page. It is a plain description of the data, and it changes when the data does.

What a person writes

The company notes under “the business”, covering what each company does and what tends to move its stock, are written by hand by the BeStock desk. They are meant to be evergreen, so they avoid figures that go stale. If a business changes, for example after a large acquisition or a spin-off, we revise the note. The articles in our analysis section are written by the same desk and carry a publication date.

What we do not do

• We do not accept payment to rank, feature or rate a stock.
• We do not give buy or sell recommendations on stock pages. Analyst ratings shown there are other firms’ opinions and are labelled as such.
• We use referral links only in broker reviews. They are kept out of stock pages, rankings and summaries.

Errors and corrections

Data feeds make mistakes and so do we. If a figure looks wrong, write to [email protected] with the page address and the number in question. We check it against the company’s filing, fix the page if it is wrong, and add a dated correction note to any article that was affected.

Nothing on BeStock is investment advice. Read the full disclaimer and the about page for more on who we are.