Visible Alpha integration

We have released a Visible Alpha integration, allowing users to retrieve and use Visible Alpha's historical and forecast consensus data on KPI, segment and financial metrics for over 6,000 publicly-traded companies across more than 150 industries.

Visible Alpha’s proprietary standardized financial and operating data is now live on the Exabel platform, and available to all Exabel users with a Visible Alpha license. Now, Exabel users can access Visible Alpha estimates and actuals to analyze the true operating metrics that drive company and industry performance. Visible Alpha’s KPIs can also be made available to all Exabel Insights Platform Partners who have a Visible Alpha license. This enables Exabel’s Alternative Data provider Insights Platform partners and their clients to see their data side by side with relevant KPI predictions, consensus estimates, as well as actual reported results across the very detailed product, segment, and geo business lines that these data providers cover.

For more about the partnership, see our press release.

Using Visible Alpha data

📘

Available only to users with a Visible Alpha license

Please reach out to Exabel support at [email protected], and fill out this form to request access.

To begin using Visible Alpha in your analysis, you may use either a pre-defined set of Visible Alpha signals covering the most common line items, or create your own signals.

Pre-defined signals

In your Library, look for the "Visible Alpha Common Signals" folder. This contains a set of derived signals for the most common line items, with options for actuals / consensus estimates, and different periodicities (Q - quarter / S - semi-annual / A - annual).

These are aligned by default to the actual fiscal period - the exact date on which a company's fiscal period ends. The other alignment options are for fiscal period (normalized to month-end) and report date (the date on which each fiscal period was reported) - you will have to create your own signals to use these alignments.

From the Library, these pre-defined signals may be opened in Signal Explorer for charting & correlation analysis, or used in analytics tools like Prediction Models, Alpha Tests and Portfolio Strategies.

Create your own signals

You may also create your own derived signals to retrieve any Visible Alpha line item, using the va_actual() and va_consensus() DSL functions to retrieve actuals and consensus estimates respectively.

The main argument you will need to provide is the Visible Alpha "parameter" referencing the financial / operational line item. You may provide this as a text string for the most common line items, or as a number for any other line items. For example, these are valid signal expressions:

• va_actual('Total revenue'): Visible Alpha actuals for total revenue
• va_actual(5383): Visible Alpha actuals for comparable sales

📘

Why are a limited set of line items referenced by their text names?

Not all line items are available as text strings because these parameter names are subject to frequent revision by Visible Alpha. If your signal expressions were to use the parameter text names, they would be fragile and stop working if Visible Alpha were to rename the line item in future. In contrast, the numeric IDs do not change even when the line item has been renamed.

To find the numeric parameter IDs for Visible Alpha line items, do the following:

1. Login to the Visible Alpha terminal
2. Open the view for your company of interest
3. Click on the line item of interest
4. Click on "Line Item Details" in the bottom panel, and look for the "Excel Code".

There may be multiple Excel Codes - any will work, but we generally recommend picking the "Standardized Data Excel Code" if available, as that will generally be applicable across multiple companies, where relevant.

By creating your own Visible Alpha signals, you may also specify arguments for periodicity, date alignment, etc. For more details, see the DSL documentation for Visible Alpha signals.

👍

Roadmap: Visible Alpha signal wizard

We are planning to develop a new wizard for creating Visible Alpha signals, through a point-and-click interface, to simplify the above process.

Please contact us if you would like to provide feedback into this design process!