Macrotrends: long-run financial history for listed companies
Free pages with years of annual and quarterly figures for listed companies, plus long-run charts for markets, commodities and the US economy.
The site: Macrotrends. Cost: Free. Useful for: companies.
What it is
Macrotrends is a free research site that puts long runs of financial data on simple pages. For a listed company, a page such as revenue shows tables of annual and quarterly figures going back many years. Apple’s revenue page, for example, has annual figures from 2011 and quarterly figures from mid-2011 to the latest quarter, with a short summary and a table of peers.
A separate page gives the history of the price to earnings ratio, with the stock price and trailing EPS behind it. The site also has long-run charts for stock indices, for commodities such as gold, silver and crude oil, and for US economic series such as inflation, unemployment and housing.
Use it for
- Seeing a company’s revenue trend over a decade or more in one place
- Checking how a valuation multiple such as P/E has moved over time
- Comparing a company with the peers listed on its page
- Pulling context charts for markets and commodities
It saves time when you want the shape of a company’s history before opening a stack of annual reports.
How to use it
- Search macrotrends.net for the company name or ticker.
- Open the measure you want, such as revenue or P/E ratio.
- Read the summary lines for the latest quarter, the trailing twelve months and recent years.
- Scan the annual and quarterly tables for turning points.
- Check any figure you plan to use against the company’s own filings.
Read the tables rather than the page title. On the pages checked, the years in the title did not always match the years in the table.
Example
A student studying Apple can open its revenue page and see annual revenue for each year since 2011 and quarterly figures to the latest quarter. Moving to the P/E ratio page shows how the market’s valuation of those earnings has changed over a similar period.
Watch out for
- Figures are compiled by the site, not the company, so verify them in the filings before citing.
- Page titles and table date ranges do not always match.
- It gives data without commentary, so you still need the annual report to explain why figures moved.
It works well alongside SEC EDGAR full-text search, Investor relations pages and annual reports and Yahoo Finance.
Checklist
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