Stocks A to Z / Stocks B / Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A)
No. of Recommendations: 12
I noticed that the VL download is messed up this week. The prices are all wrong. I also looked at the timeliness rankings this time because I use them for my options screening. They appear to be out of date too, and that's not something that will be corrected by real time price updates.
I've notified VL, but unless they provide a fresh and correct download file any rankings produced will be garbage. And they never provide a fresh download when they mess up this way.
Elan
No. of Recommendations: 15
FYI, I really dug in my heels and complained about the garbage price phenomenon, trying every level of escalation I could. They have traditionally been wilfully dense in terms of understanding the problem. I got a little bit of traction by telling their sales people that I would not renew because the files were garbage--he intervened, a little.
After much prodding they admitted that yes, they had confirmed the problem, and confirmed that all the prices were wrong sometimes. They say they have no ability at all to correct any file once it has gone out. After I pointed out that many of their historical files are full of garbage, they did offer to delete the bad files from the page that allows downloading them! Such generosity.
If I recall correctly they made some noises about having identified and fixed the problem, but from your current observation clearly that is not the case.
Jim
No. of Recommendations: 0
Is their other data valid? Or is it just the prices that are bad?
No. of Recommendations: 5
Is their other data valid? Or is it just the prices that are bad?
Usually when the current price is bad, the total return fields - 1 week, 4 weeks, 13 weeks, etc. are also bad, which invalidates most of our screens. I don't know about other data.
Thank you Mungofich for going the extra mile on this issue. When I write to them about it they typically have the usual canned response - what version of VLIA are you running? Please send us a screen shot of the bad prices you found. When I addressed all those and told them that it's a recurring problem, and they need a better data updating process and a data validation procedure, I got silence.
Elan
