Jan Domanski

Companies publish their results every quarter. These results are often a good indication how a company will perform in the year (if Q'1 data for 2012 are better than the Q'1 from 2011, that's generally a good sign). The Q'4 report is also published much earlier that the yearly report for a company, at least in Poland the gap can be a few months. So the question is do the combined Q'1-Q'4 results represent in essence the same information, as results published in the yearly report for which one has to wait, could one use the information in the summed Q'1-Q'4 reports to derive at least a good estimate of the yearly results? So here is a data for KGHM Table 1. Income (after tax) for KGHM with quarterly report data summed up for each year (YR and QT are the consolidated yearly and quarterly results; both are given in thousands of PLN) Year YR Q'1-Q'4  (sum) Fractional difference 2001 -838,625 -830,943 0.009 2002 -214,734 -216,299 -0.007 ...

There is a number of simple questions about the financial statements of the companies listed on the WIG that I'd like to understand. One of these questions is: do the quarterly results (for Q1-4 of a given year) add up to the yearly results (of that year)? Getting the answer is difficult because 1. I don't own the data, 2. processing it is not super-straightforward. Today, I'm happy to report that hurdle 1. is down: scrapping Polish pages related to markets was made very simple by using a simple snippet import re from mechanize import Browser br = Browser() ... html_doc = br.response().read() html_doc = re.sub('content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-2"', "", html_doc)  soup = BeautifulSoup(html_doc) Doing the simple 'sed'-like replacement solved all the issues BeautifulSoup had parsing the response I was getting from http://gielda.wp.pl