Hi,
All I know that most people here are index investors but I am interested in how a companies fundamentals influence it's stock price. I've been browsing through financial statements and have been frustrated by the lack of agreement between different data providers ... i.e. differences to the tune of billions of dollars.
Take for example IBM's 2016 financials, morningstar, yahoo finance, google finance, and edgar all report different numbers for Sales, General and Administrative Operating Expenses:
Morningstar: 20,479,000,000 (
http://financials.morningstar.com/income-statement/is.html?t=IBM®ion=USA&culture=en_US)
Yahoo Finance: 19,438,000,000 (
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/IBM/financials?p=IBM)
Google Finance: 19,640,000,000 (
https://finance.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3AIBM&fstype=ii)
SEC Edgar: 21,069,000,000 (
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/51143/000110465917003081/a17-2670_1ex99d1.htm)
Yahoo and Google are the closest but that's still a 200 million dollar difference.
I believe that the 8-k filing referenced from EDGAR is probably the most authoritative source and morningstar, yahoo and google are sourcing their info from that in some fashion. So my main question is they are clearly pulling values in a different way than I am interpreting them. Maybe the differences is that the SEC Edgar numbers are not GAAP?
Thanks for any help!