Estimates. Here we are at the company Snapshot screen for Apple, and I want to take a look at their estimates. If I go to All Estimates, this will give me a high-level summary of the estimates and you can see that it starts with EPS. Here, we've also got Segment Estimates, although you won't get that for all companies, and as we continue to scroll down, you'll find the Income Statement Estimates. For example, you can see here Sales and EBITDA Estimates. These items are clickable, so if you click, it will give you a little bit of information about that particular item.

As we continue to scroll down, we've also got Balance Sheet Estimates and Cashflow Estimates, and then the Valuation Metrics, which are based on those estimates. And you won't have all of this information for every company, but Apple in particular is a very large company so it has lots of analysts publishing research on it, and therefore, lots of estimates data is available. One thing to be wary of is that particularly for smaller companies, the estimates data becomes much thinner and less reliable as you look further out into the future. This is because there are fewer analysts publishing research further into the future, so the estimates are based on much fewer data points, or sometimes, they're not available at all. Also, for smaller companies, analysts might not forecast more than three years, and in some cases, only two years. So if only a few analysts cover the stock, you might not get much estimates data beyond even two years. We can then go down to the Estimate Summary, and you can see that this gives a little bit more detail on the estimates, and here I can change the data that I can see. For example, I can choose the different segments that I want data on. I've got EBITDA and Sales here, but if I wanted, I could choose to change the currency, or even change the data so that it's showing fiscal quarters, instead of fiscal years. So it's pretty useful information and also very customizable. If I go back to All Estimates, you can see that I can download this information when I click on the green arrow icon, and I can download this data either as Values or I can download it as FDS codes. So here's the spreadsheet that I get. If I download the FDS codes. This embeds a link in Excel so that I can refresh the FactSet download using an Excel add-in. And you can see that this gives all the estimates in Excel, but also, if you go into the cells, it gives you a breakdown of the FactSet Excel formulas, which specifies the data item, the year, the estimates methodology, and even the currency. And as we saw when we were viewing the FactSet estimates data, this does become more patchy as you go further out into the future. One thing to note is that the FactSet Excel add-in is a really useful tool, particularly if you're building a trading comparables model and you want to bring in the estimates numbers to your model. Then, you can just refresh the data whenever needed.