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The week's question
In December 2024, in the thread "Re: BRK: Why Not XOM?", BreckHutHigh asked the members: "What about the long road trips with kids?" This week it is put to everyone again. The button below opens the small thread re-asking it - read what others have said so far, then give your own answer as an ordinary reply.
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Investment Strategies / Mechanical Investing
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Author: mungofitch 🐝🐝🐝 GOLD
SHREWD
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Number: of 6131 
Subject: Re: No rankings
Date: 07/03/25 9:17 PM
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I could, but it's a hassle and I'm lazy.

I get it : )

My spot check went like this:

I have all my files for a given year in a given directory exported as tab delimited .txt files.
I use Unix command "cut -f4,13,20,184-189 *.txt | grep MSFT"
4=ticker, 13=price, 20=P/E, 184-190 are total returns 1 week through 1 year with the little used YTD figure in the middle.

That gives me the stock price, P/E, and a bunch of total return fields for Apple, week by week.
Any file that gives blank total returns will jump out. Second most common is that multiple lookbacks on a given row have identical numbers, which is essentially impossible.
Microsoft is handy because when the prices are wrong, they are wrong by a mile, being two digits instead of three, and the P/E ratio falls to single digits.

There may be other fields which are garbage from time to time, of course. My list of bad weeks up thread shows the ones that (by the process above) are known bad...the rest might be good, or might have other types of errors that I haven't discovered.

I'm not actually using the data except for statistical analysis these days, having shut down my MI portfolio in March. I keep it up more just by habit, and because I paid for multiple years of subscription in advance. I'm a data pack rat.

Jim
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This community has written 6,115 posts about Mechanical Investing. The article-length ones it recommended most:
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