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from your experience - would you rely on yahoo finance data as a source for your research?

For example 1st Constitution Bancorp (NASDAQ FCCY):

  • Yahoo finance claims under Balance Sheet data $245,490,000 in Cash And Cash Equivalents. Making it insane $34.7 Cash Per Share for $17 stock (204%)

  • In SEC filing its $14,211,000 making it reasonable CPS 1.76 (10.39%)

Am I getting something wrong from GAAP perspective or is yahoo finance dubious source. (I assume large cap company data will be correct)

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Sure, Yahoo Finance makes mistakes from time to time. That's the nature of free data.

However, I think the issue here is that yahoo is aggregating several line items into one. Like maybe reporting cash equivalents plus total investment securities minus loans as "cash equivalents." This aggregation is done by a computer program somewhere and may or may not be appropriate for a particular purpose and firm.

For this reason, if you are trying to do top quality research, it's always better to go to the original SEC filings, if you can. Then you will know for sure which items you are looking at. The only mistakes will be the ones made by the accountants at the firm in question.

If there's a reason you prefer to use yahoo, like if it's easier for your code to scrape, then spend a little time comparing to the SEC filing to ensure you know where the numbers really come from before using it.

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  • Could you recommend me a source of high quality data? (of course it will not be free) - except Bloomberg Terminal - with API
    – yety
    Commented Aug 13, 2017 at 20:46
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    I don't do that (I am an academic and normally use compustat) but you might look at quandl. I believe you can get Zacks through them, for example.
    – farnsy
    Commented Aug 13, 2017 at 20:56
  • try dev.last10k.com; it offers a free api for sec filings including returning balance sheet data directly from the original 10k/10q (disclosure: I work for last10k.com)
    – HBCondo
    Commented Aug 27, 2017 at 7:07

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