New site delivers free transcripts of conference calls

Back in the “Mad Men” days your broker had a real informational advantage. As an investor, you had two choices; get rich and install your own household stock ticker, or wait the prices in tomorrow’s paper.

In the time since that advantage has, of course, eroded, with most investors having access to real time quotes and proprietary research, such as the stuff we access here at Cantech Letter.

Our friend and resident expert on all things value investing, Saj Karsan, has tightened the gap between the pros and joes even further, with the launch of a new website called www.conferencecalltranscripts.org where investors can access transcripts of company conference calls, which are otherwise hard to find and spread out around the internet. We talked to Saj about the site.

Saj, How did you come up with this idea?

I’m foremost an investor, and reading call transcripts is part of my stock research process. Unfortunately, I found myself spending a lot of time looking for these transcripts. Sometimes, they don’t exist. Other times, they are on company websites, while in other cases they are behind paywalls or available in obscure places on the internet. So basically, I created an algorithm to seek these transcripts out, and pull their locations into one database. I’ve now shared this database.

The site was born to solve a problem you yourself were having…

That’s right. And the same thing happened a few days later as I was searching for a transcript that was being created in real-time. Rather than pushing refresh on the transcripts site, I thought it would be cool if the site could e-mail me when the transcript was in. So now, the site has notifications: users can create a portfolio of companies they follow, and when a new transcript becomes available, they will be notified and sent a link to it.

Any other features you think readers might be interested in?

Most recently, the site now offers notifications for company filings. That is, you can select an option to receive notifications when a company you follow issues a new filing, whether it’s an annual report or a financial or proxy statement. There are sites that offer this feature in the US, but to my knowledge mine is the first to offer such a feature for free for Canadian stocks.

You can search for company transcripts at http://www.conferencecalltranscripts.org , and you can sign up for transcript and filing notifications at http://www.conferencecalltranscripts.org/get_notified/

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