For a value investor’s stock the four most important days of the year are when the company quarterly results come out. This is the time of the year when public companies take a break from their secrecy and announce to their holders what they’ve achieved, through webcasts and conference calls, and often, what they expect to achieve in the future.

Having switched to using Google’s great calendaring service, I found that it is a little bit difficult to keep track of the quarterly meetings on any of the calendar apps, web or not, unless you add them one by one yourself. This should come as a surprise, as both Google Finance and Yahoo! Finance have your portfolio saved and should present you with the option of adding the information directly to your calendar.

Having not found anything that even remotely accomplishes this, I’ve written a public service that will do just this: configure once, and forget for all eternity.

This is essentially an earnings announcement calendar aggregator. I’ve named it MyEarnCal for short for now. You don’t need to create a portfolio, account, pay me any money, or anything like that at all (it’s free.)

You can use it right away through any calendaring service that supports iCal, like Google Calendar. Subscribe to the following calendar:

/myearncal/MSFT+AMZN

Substituting MSFT+AMZN for any list of stock tickers you’d like. For example

/myearncal/GOOG+GE+JNJ

will show earnings announcements for Google, General Electric, and Johnson and Johnson. And you don’t have to do anything at all for the next batch, it will automatically show up.

This is still in beta; the only missing feature, is accurate reporting of the time of the press conference. Right now, all After Market conferences will show as 4:30 events, while Pre-Market events will show as 9:00 events. For now, it accomplishes the essential feature, allowing you to add your share’s earnings announcements and corporate actions to the plethora of calendars that take the iCalendar standard, such as Kontact/Korganizer, iCal, Google Calendar, Evolution, and Outlook 2007.

Here is the calendar for some favorites stocks to watch, as imported by Google Calendar:

Update: I’ve noticed that sometimes, it takes a while to load one of these calendars on Google Calendar. This happens because Google Calendar indexes the calendar at the address once, and will cache it for later. So one way to get around any error messages Google Calendar reports is to just wait a few hours and retry again with the exact same URI address.

Although this figure came out weeks ago during Apple’s Showtime event, I’d like to mention this, because it reinforces the prediction made in the iTunes sales statistics page, that 2 billion downloads will be reached by February 2007. As you can see from the graph on that page, the 1.5bn mark was predicted for the first half of September, which coincided with this announcement.

I’m very interested in seeing what kind of traffic iTunes movies will have; I am very enthused by the news that Wal*Mart might potentially work together with the iTunes store. Wal*Mart is the largest sole retailer of DVDs, but as I am sure, they realize the business of physical distribution of data has an expiration date.

At this point, the iTunes Store - a rename of the original iTunes Music Store - has huge potential. I am convinced the non-Disney studios have no choice but to eventually join, and I am happy Apple did not water down their terms of service (to the best of my knowledge) to appease them. iTunes presents a money-on-the-table opportunity for them, and they’d be crazy to not jump the wagon. I thus expect them to resist until the first quarter of 2007, right after the shopping season, where most DVDs are bought, largely as gifts. As this is not the market iTunes would serve well for now, their interest in joining iTunes is displaced by the potential alienation of their largest distributors, who would do a better job of serving the holiday season anyway.

Nothing brings me this much joy. I wish I had more nonsensical akwardly worded forms to fill in! Though most people file their taxes online, for us immigrants that’s not a choice. Thank goodness for these official IRS fill-in pdfs though; turns out I don’t have to use one of those pesky ink-in-a-stick writing utensils (so 20th century.)

Admittedly one of the few ways the Bloomberg Terminal distinguishes itself from the rest of the pack of financial data reporting, is the excellent News tracker. When you are viewing any chart, for example historical prices of a share, you can click on any point of the chart to view the news stories that occurred at that particular date and time.

I liked this little feature so much (it can make a lot of trends immediately obvious) that I’ve implemented my own little version for my news-equity correlation project, which could capture emailed Bloomberg stories and save them in a database. This was soon extended to capture stories from prespecified Google Alerts, and the task at hand was to learn to predict trends in the share price based on patterns in the news stories.It looks like Google has been busy. The all new, Google Finance site has this amazing little feature, and though it might not have as much content as Bloomberg, it is slick, functional, and appealing. I will be using this often.

Though the live iTunes counter was short lived, I’ve used the official data I automatically collected from the site plus the press release milestones Apple releases from time to time to predict the future.

It appears Apple will be hitting the 2 billion downloads mark sometime in early 2007 - I look forward to that.