Where the numbers come from, and how we check them

Gouda takes each public company’s financial results and divides them by its number of shares. You buy a stock one share at a time, so that’s how Gouda shows it: what one share brought in, earned, owns and owes.

Why “Gouda”?

A company is like a wheel of cheese, and a share is one wedge of it. When you buy a share, you own that wedge: its part of the sales, the profit, the cash and the debt. Gouda shows you what’s in your wedge. (And yes, it also sounds like “good-a” investing.)

The source: company filings with the SEC

Every US public company files its results with the Securities and Exchange Commission: an annual report (Form 10-K) and three quarterly reports (Form 10-Q) each year. The SEC publishes those numbers in a structured form. Gouda reads them directly, for every company, and nothing is typed in by hand.

When a company files a new report, Gouda picks it up within a day or two.

What “per share” means here

• Sales, profit and cash flow cover the last 12 months: the latest full fiscal year, plus this year so far, minus the same part of last year. They’re divided by the average number of shares over that time, counting shares that could be created from stock options and convertible securities (the “diluted” count companies use for their own earnings per share).
• Cash, debt and book value come from the latest balance sheet and are divided by the shares outstanding on that date.
• History shows each fiscal year from the company’s annual reports, usually the last 10.

One-time gains and losses

When a company sells or shuts down part of its business, the gain or loss can swamp a year’s results. Gouda still shows the official profit, but when that one-time item is large (a tenth of profit or more, or enough to turn a profit into a loss) it also shows the profit of the ongoing business, and works out the P/E and “years to earn back your price” from that. Companies’ own “adjusted” earnings often leave out more than this; Gouda only separates what the company itself reports as discontinued operations.

The hard parts we handle automatically

• Stock splits. After a split, old share counts and per-share figures aren’t comparable. Gouda finds splits from the filings themselves and adjusts every earlier year, so ten years compare fairly.
• Restated numbers. Companies sometimes revise past results. Gouda always uses the most recently filed version.
• Different labels. Companies don’t all use the same names for the same line, and some change them over time. Gouda knows the common alternatives, including the ones banks, insurers and landlords use.
• Several share classes. Some companies have share classes worth different amounts (one Berkshire Hathaway Class A share equals 1,500 Class B shares). Gouda works out the share count in the traded class’s units from each class’s reported earnings per share.

Foreign companies

Many foreign companies list in the US through depositary shares (ADRs or ADSs), where one US share stands for several of the company’s home-market shares, or a fraction of one. Gouda reads that ratio from each company’s annual report and shows every figure per US-traded share, the one you’d actually buy. Companies that report in another currency are converted to US dollars using the Federal Reserve’s exchange rates: the average rate over the period for sales, profit and cash flow, and the rate on the balance-sheet date for cash, debt and book value. Companies using international accounting rules (IFRS) are read in their closest US equivalents. Each of these is noted on the company’s page.

Check any number yourself

Each section of a company page names the SEC filing its numbers came from, with a link to it, and the bottom of the page lists the annual report behind every year of history. If something looks off, you can open the original in one click.

The checks every company must pass

Before a company appears on Gouda, its numbers must pass automatic checks. The most important: Gouda’s own profit per share must match the earnings per share the company reported. If the share count or profit figure were wrong, they wouldn’t match. Gouda also checks that revenue figures agree with each other and that the company’s filings are recent.

Every year of history is checked too. If a year’s profit per share doesn’t match what the company reported, and the gap is an obvious units mistake in the filing (a share count filed in thousands instead of ones, say), Gouda corrects it; otherwise that year is left blank rather than shown. Gouda also checks that the balance-sheet share count lines up with the average count, and that the last 12 months are in the same range as the last full year. Every night, before anything is published, an automatic audit looks across all companies for numbers that only data mistakes produce, and stops the update if it finds any.

Companies that fail are held back until the cause is fixed, rather than shown with numbers that might be wrong. Where a small gap comes from something like preferred dividends, Gouda shows the company’s own reported earnings per share and notes it on the page.

Who isn’t covered yet

• Some foreign companies: those whose depositary-share ratio we can’t read from their filings, or whose latest results aren’t in the SEC’s structured data yet.
• Funds and trusts, which don’t file standard company financial statements.
• Blank-check companies (SPACs), which have no operating business yet.
• New listings until they file their first annual report.

Prices

Share prices are delayed 15 minutes during market hours and come from a licensed market-data provider. Everything that depends on the price (the value of your shares, P/E and the other price ratios) updates as the price does.

The assistant

“Ask about these numbers” uses an AI model to explain the figures on a page in plain language. It sees the same numbers you do. It explains; it doesn’t recommend, and it can make mistakes, so check anything important against the numbers on the page and the company’s filings.

What Gouda isn’t

Gouda is for education and research. It isn’t investment advice, and nothing on it is a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Numbers come from company filings and may contain errors; always check the original filing before relying on a figure. Each company page links to its filings.