Read and Discuss financial documents at Two Margins

Companies report their earnings each quarter. They publish this information along with other related financial and business data in their reports. These financial documents are fueling the debate among investors and analysts. Will the earnings beat the estimates? Will the company miss the market’s expectations? If you were an investor, should you hold your position or give up your shares?

Yet, the financial information found there seldom appeals to amateur investors. Often you need a degree in economics to grasp the meaning of all those numbers. Most just wait for the stock market to speak for itself. If the share price climbs, it must have been a good report.

Now, a web service helps you figure out the meaning of the financial documents, by sparking an online discussion based on the published financial data. The service isn’t that new, given Wall Street Journal wrote about it last year.

Jasmine from TwoMargins.com contacted me the other day and introduced me to their service. TwoMargins allows you to check financial documents released by big companies and comment on them.

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Adding a note is simple. You can pinpoint the exact text or number you are annotating, underlining it automatically.

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What’s more, you can check remarks of other users and join the conversation. Welcome to the online social world on financial information!

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It’s not the first time I myself read financial reports. Sometimes I read similar financial data of Greek companies. Yet, it was exciting having the opportunity to access Google’s, LinkedIn’s and GoPro’s reports (to name a few) at the same place. And you don’t get to read the report a month after its release. Here’s Thursday’s GoPro report, for example.

Have I joined TwoMargins.com? I sure did. But I don’t expect writing a comment on a financial document anytime soon. I’ll let more experienced analysts and traders share their views. Besides, speaking less and listening more is generally recommended.

I was also surprised to run into several comments left by an analyst coming from my homeland, Fani Kelesidou. Isn’t the world small?

If you love reading financial reports or discussing with other like-minded people on finance, here’s the TwoMargins website.