First off, I'd like to know how I can practice creating an actual model. Should I just recreate the Excel worksheets in the Joshua Pearl/Rosenbaum book or do you know of a site that offers templates? The ones WallStreetPrep offers for the pre-seminar preparation seem quite rudimentary and I'd like to practice creating an entire full-fledged model to get a hold of how it works.
Second, I'd like to know where information is sourced from in real-life situations. It seems that it would take forever to look through 10 SEC filings for a single company. Then again, I noticed that if you use Capital IQ or another similar service to export data onto Excel, you're often bombarded with comparables (for instance) for which plenty of data is missing, or for for which data is outdated or false. So which is it, do you go online and look through all the filings, research reports, etc. or do you export the data, which is faster, but perhaps unreliable?
Not sure if I'm making myself clear.. please let me know if there's anything I should clarify.
And thanks a lot for any help and advice!
Start off just by copying preexisting model templates to get comfortable with the process, then start to tweak as needed.
Strictly speaking you should probably use the filings, but just use CapIQ or equivalent for export, then if anything doesn't look right check the filing. You WILL need to skim through the notes in the filings to find details on certain things such as buybacks, splits, share classes, D&A, non recurring items etc.
Alright then, so Capital IQ and the Bloomberg Terminal are generally accurate enough to be used without double checking? Nice cat picture by the way
At my bank, we almost always will source the data from the company filing itself. We generally use CapIQ as a check or if we need to pull a quick number for reference purposes. But generally, we pull from filings because it's not until you live the following scenario that it becomes apparent why filings are better:
MD: This data point looks weird. Where did you get this data point from? Analyst: Oh, it was an auto pull from CapIQ MD: rolls eyes
Much better to say you found it from the actual source document.
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