David Trainer walks through upgrades to a financial modeling tool that let you click from any line item straight to the original SEC filing text. The improvements include a marked-up filings menu and the ability to trace unusual items like exit costs through footnotes and MD&A to calculate more accurate metrics like economic earnings.
Chapters
We've updated our models to make them even more transparent and make the auditability of our data even easier for clients to use. For example, if you wanted to see where the net income number comes from in our model, we'll take you to that original filing text immediately just by clicking on that number. In addition, when it comes to looking through the original filings, we've upgraded the menu item on the click-through or marked-up filings feature so that you can very quickly see data points within the filing. Here, for example, on page F-83, which could be page 283 or 483, who knows, in the filing, we've highlighted some unusual costs coming out of the business that you don't see on the income statement. These are exit costs as related to a particular note on exit costs for the exiting of the Jefferies business, or piece of the Jefferies business, for Leucadia. If we look at a prior year, we can find a similar set of adjustments, a much higher number related again to these exit costs. And we'll note that in 2015 they point out that they expect to see some additional costs coming out in 2016, but much lower. We can check that immediately by again looking at this particular note and saying yes, it was lower as they predicted. If we go to the income statement, we'll see that there's nothing on the income statement that reflects these exit costs. That's why it's important to go through the footnotes, to go through the MD&A, to identify items that are unusual in nature, non-recurring, so that our measure of net operating profit after tax and return on invested capital and economic earnings is the best, most apples-to-apple measure in the business.
