Here is the first installment of a new DealBreaker feature, Huge Tools of the Week. The feature is designed to present the financial community with helpful additional resources, from fledging online utilities people may not know of to the name of a good 24-hour rub and tug establishment (Starbucks does close, after all).
Spreading comps can be the bane of an I-banking analyst's existence. Not necessarily an onerous task by itself, comp spreading is always the icing on the cake, the extra obligation amidst a sea of other life ruining tasks. Comp assignments always creep up on you, when some VP in the diversified group absolutely needs the Enterprise Networking Comps, stat, on a Friday night for some meaningless pitch, ensuring that comps are the only thing you will be spreading over the weekend.
It would be one thing if senior people would accept a CapitalIQ comp printout or a Factset download, but that would be far too rational, and often numbers from those services are not properly vetted. Besides, they cost thousands of dollars a month and scrambling for a CapIQ password from one of your banker friends is annoying.
TradingComps.com is a free site created by ex-Citi analyst Dave Schmierer. The site is designed to be a user-interactive ‘compmunity’ of sorts, almost wiki-style, allowing users to upload their own comps, and check and discuss existing comps on the site. This way, you can do everything from send a blast request for comps across the Street (instead of just to your group and your friends), to check (by check we mean steal) your own comps with comps spread by other analysts at other banks.
Here’s the description from ‘the Architect,’ Big Papi Schmierer:
Don't tell your summer analysts just yet, but TradingComps.com is a new website that hopes to make their lives a little better. By providing a platform for users to share and collaborate on financial data and modeling online, Trading Comps hopes to foster the growth of a community dedicated to bringing sophisticated financial modeling to the masses (and to the inexperienced interns).Trading Comps uses the leading online spreadsheet technology from EditGrid to deliver its vision of free, accurate, and transparent valuation information for all. But it doesn't need to stop there. Whether you're interested in how many subscribers canceled their NetFlix accounts last quarter or how many passengers boarded a JetBlue plane last month, it's likely there's someone else with that same interest out there, and at Trading Comps you can find each other and pursue new avenues of research.
Once you sign up for a Trading Comps account you can upload and manage your spreadsheets from your private workspace online. If you eventually want to share something with the community it's easy to do so. And even if you don't have anything to upload, there are plenty of ways to be an active Trading Comps contributor.
The site just recently launched and its comp library is growing. Stop by and spend a few minutes to see what it's all about, your summer analysts might even thank you.
Posted by joe, Jul 06, 2007 9:56AM
It's actually a really good idea... until the first time some wiki-schmuck makes a glaring mistake that you don't catch and the MD in Industrials is wondering why the mean EBITDA multiple for widget manufacturers is 16x instead of 8x.