Introducing phreakonomics.in - Finance tools

Hi VPers,
This is my effort at giving back to the community from which I have taken a lot. I intend to develop more tools in this portal in my free time as I enjoy building things.

Today I want to introduce you to the Export/Import data tool.

You can access it at

http://phreakonomics.in/

(Please excuse the self-indulgent name; I couldn’t resist.)

It is accessible on the homepage as default since this is the only tool that is ready as of now.

The data is split into Macro, Micro and Current. Let’s run through each of these.

Macro

The Macro data has data for All countries, commodities and pits exports against imports and calculates deficits.

You can filter this data by country, so for eg. you can see how imports/exports with just the US.

You can see how our exports to US are higher than our imports.

You can also see what the exact products we export to the US and what is the share of each of the commodities.

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This chart shows data for the row that is selected on the left data table. By default it is the latest FY (FY19 now) but you can always change this to see data for FY15 or FY12 or whichever year and see how the distribution varied over the years.

You can also toggle Exports and Imports for this chart by using these buttons above the chart.

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It defaults to Exports and Commodities. You can change it to view imports or view a country-wise breakup.

By using the tabs at the top that look like this

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You can view this data by quarters or by months as well.

You can filter specific commodity or choose a set of countries or change currency as well to USD.

Micro

The micro data is for specific commodities so we can drilldown better to say, view Basmati rice exports or Crude oil imports.

Some of you might be familiar with charts from this section as I have posted them in various threads before.

The top chart shows overall Value and Volume growth trend over last several years. This is the trend for Marine exports.

The use of a tool such as this is in finding these trends - In retrospect, you can look at how the exports picked up in FY10 and has sustained since.

The realisation chart shows how the price realisation has moved.

There is also a table and pie chart that shows the data table and a split-up by Country.

It is also possible to navigate to Micro from Macro through the pie-chart by clicking on a specific country or commodity in the Macro pie chart - either exports or imports.

The power of the tool is in viewing short-term as well as long-term trends. Short-term trends can be viewed by seeing monthly data for a commodity. I had posted on the Avanti thread about a possible peak in exports few months back. I discerned this from the monthly data for marine exports.

So this way, the tool can be used to predict upcoming downtrends as well.

All this can be done for imports as well by toggling to the Imports tab at the top. It can get interesting when you view a commodity both from import and export perspective to see if there is an import substitution trend at play!

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To make it easier to view current trends, I built a small module here.

With this, you can view the best performing commodities and of course the worst as well. You can sort asc/desc by month/quarter/year.

Warnings

  1. This data is just an indicator of where the sector is going. Finding and benefitting from companies in the sector is a different ballgame altogether.
  2. Sometimes value might seem to be rising while the margins for a company might be dwindling - so view these numbers carefully, along with a specific company’s financials to arrive at decisions.
  3. Lot of these commodities are very small markets and may not be beneficial from an equity investing standpoint.

Disclaimer
I am not responsible for any loss or gains you make from this data and I am not responsible for any errors in the numbers.

I intend to keep these tools free if the time taken to develop them isn’t much but if in the future something takes substantial time to develop and maintain and run, I might charge a nominal fee.

Feel free to share links to substantiate data in VP posts if you would like to. Also, please do post about any interesting trends you might spot so that its useful for everyone. We can discuss those as well in this thread.

This tool is meant to be used on a big screen due to the amount of data it shows. It may not work well on small screens.

If you spot any bugs, please reach out to me personally either on VP or at phreakv6 at gmail dot com. If you have any comments/suggestions, please leave them in this thread.

Hope this is of some use. Thanks to @suru27 who shared the MoC link that had the data without which my interest would never have gotten piqued.

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This is a fantastic tool @phreakv6! Thanks for developing and sharing this.

I was viewing data for COAL and I noticed that the bar chart does not show any imports (table showed 0 cr). However India does import coal. Are you sure this is correct?

EDIT: Noticed this same thing for ‘DRUGS, PHRMCUTES & FINE CHEMLS’, ‘MACHINERY & INSTRUMENTS’. I randomly checked for a few product categories. Its possible other product categories will also have this same trend.

There are 4 different product categories with these names:

  1. PETROLEUM: CRUDE & PRODUCTS
  2. PETROLEUM: CRUDE
  3. PETROLEUM PRODUCTS
  4. PETROLEUM, CRUDE & PRODUCTS

Can these be clubbed into a single category?

Thanks. The problem is that the MoC data isn’t sanitised. They have changed commodity names sometimes (mostly in FY09) to club by-products and this is what has happened for Coal as well I think. This is the right link to view latest Coal Macro with “COAL,COKE AND BRIQUITTES ETC”.

http://phreakonomics.in/export-import/macro?startDate=2000-04-01&endDate=2018-08-01&currency=inr&commodity=110&country=&country[]=0&consolidation=fy

Our exports are too small in comparison to imports so the export bars aren’t visible for most years.

If you are viewing individual commodities, I suggest you use the Micro -> Exports and Micro -> Imports for the commodity.

For Coal, this will be

Coal Exports -> http://phreakonomics.in/export-import/micro?startDate=2000-04-01&endDate=2018-08-01&currency=inr&commodity=110&country=&country[]=0&type=exports&consolidation=fy

Coal Imports -> http://phreakonomics.in/export-import/micro?startDate=2000-04-01&endDate=2018-08-01&currency=inr&commodity=110&country=&country[]=0&type=imports&consolidation=fy

As for clubbing the 4 petroleum products in single category - I think this is not a good idea because we import Crude and export petroleum products - The split-up here gives a good idea of the value-added by us in the exports. One of the categories doesn’t have any data and I think that can be safely removed. The other one “PETROLEUM: CRUDE & PRODUCTS” is pre FY10 where both crude and products were clubbed together. Hope that makes sense. I will remove the last one though as it has no data.

Thanks for the feedback.

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This is amazing. Thank you for building this. I’m sure it’ll be immensely useful for all kinds of investors alike. At least, I can already see how this can help ease my pain with Valuing a company. Others, I’m sure, can see much more uses for it.

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@phreakv6 Really commendable effort and very useful. But I have one query, for information regarding ferro alloys like ferrro-chrome or ferro-silicon, no data is available post FY 09. Has it moved under any other head?

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Thank you.

Where did you see the ferro-alloys data pre FY09?

I think ferro-alloys might be part of “products of iron and steel”

http://phreakonomics.in/export-import/micro?type=exports&commodity=159

I was referring to this.

By the way, on further exploration, your site seems even far more useful than my first impression. Highly appreciated.

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Excellent tool @phreakv6
Need to start thinking on how to use the data effectively.
A suggestion: Can the list in dropdown be sorted by alphabetical order?

Nice initiative.going to prove very useful tool for small investors.hats off.

@fabregas - I checked the three coal commodities and I think your point makes sense. I have merged all 3 into one under “COAL,COKE AND BRIQUITTES ETC” which MoC is currently using. This makes for good reading as data from FY01 to FY18 is available under a single head.

I have also merged “PETROLEUM, CRUDE & PRODUCTS” and “PETROLEUM: CRUDE & PRODUCTS” - One was being used for exports and another for imports. This makes for nice reading in the Macro screen from FY01 to FY09 as now we can compare the export/import ratios and deficits.

I have left Petroleum Crude and Petroleum Products as is since that has data for FY10 onward. Barring a miniscule export in FY10/11 (Reliance perhaps?), Petroleum Crude is all import data only. Petroleum Products has the value-added products which we both import and export and this data is from FY10 onward.

Hope that makes sense.

@akbarkhan - Thank you. I have made the commodity list to be in alphabetical order in Macro screen but in Micro it continues to show the most exported/imported (as applicable) in descending order. When a country or group of countries (say African countries) is selected, it makes sense to see the commodities of interest at the top of the dropdown in the Micro screens. This is what I have found very useful. Also, you can always use the search box within the dropdown to find what you need, instead of scrolling up and down. This is what I use when I know what I want to find. For other purposes - Like investigating how a Iran sanctions will affect us, it helps to see top exported commodities in the dropdown. Its a bit useful this way I feel.

This is one of things i have pondered on a fair bit in the last few months and have posted on quite a few threads (Avanti, Equity Investing Full time career, Mirza, Repro, Kokuyo etc.).

Each one is a different way to use as Avanti was more on identifying a probable end to a super trend. The Equity Investing thread post has all the commodities which were doing well - Organic Chemicals, Dyes etc. Organic Chemicals for eg. has almost doubled in exports in two of the recent three months - You can see the same being reflected in Aarti industries and Valiant Organics. At a Macro level as well I wrote a post about general Export/Import/Deficits and how it correlates with the Rupee movements based on the data.

The Mirza thread has leather footwear exports to UK - This is useful when you know that Mirza exports almost exclusively to UK. What I found in terms of marginal recovery in exports was confirmed by the management which has guided for a 5% growth in exports. Repro thread has a post looking at books export to African countries and Kokuyo - It was useful for me to track Chinese imports of Stationary. I noticed that the Chinese imports were dwindling (severe pricing pressure was faced last year) and the same is reflected in Kokuyo Camlin’s margins. The ways you can use this tool are endless! I would love to see how the community uses it and the idea for sharing this which has been very useful for me is to benefit from others’ research as well, so I am looking forward to hearing from people who use it in this thread. Please keep us posted!

Thanks guys. Looking forward to seeing how you guys use it. Please do keep this thread updated on your ideas.

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This is a wonderful tool and I’ve just started exploring it.

Take a bow.

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Nice tool!

Being a developer myself, I am curious to know whats your stack?

@mntolia - Thank you. I don’t have an affinity to any stack/platform/language and choose depending on mood. For this project its php, cakephp, bootstrap, google charts, mysql running on apache2 on ubuntu 16, hosted with digitalocean.

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great initiative @phreakv6. What is the source of the data that you are using for these commodities?

Thanks @basumallick. The source is

http://121.241.212.143/principalcommditysearch.html

I have done a fair bit of testing to ensure the numbers have stayed intact in import, transformation, consolidation and visualisation. However, an independent verification will definitely be nice.

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Brilliant effort with lot of useful information!

July '18 Exports/Imports data is in and the tool is updated with the latest data.

July macros here - https://phreakonomics.in/export-import/macro?country=0&startDate=2000-04-01&endDate=2018-08-01&currency=inr&consolidation=month

Ratio of Imports to Exports is down from the peak of 69% seen back in Feb/Mar to a manageable 59% - Crude effect.

You can check out the individual commodities as well in the Micros screen

https://phreakonomics.in/export-import/micro?type=exports

From a quick glance Organic Chemicals, Agro Chemicals, Dyes are continuing to do well. Stationary imports from China is slightly up while Marine Products degrowth is seen for the first time since Feb '16.

@dixits - Thank you

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@phreakv6 Its great to see what you have created out of a simple URL shared :slight_smile: Kudos.

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@phreakv6
Its not a problem per se, but a minor inconvenience. If I choose from the top line fields like duration, currency, commodity and countries and after that if I change the interval like quarter or year or month, the whole first line resets. So now we have to first pick charting interval and then choose appropriate fields from top line.

Is it some kind of bug or is it designed that way?

@devaki.tripathy - It is a bug. Thanks for pointing it out. I have fixed this now in the Macro screens. I also noticed that the pie chart in the Macro screen was showing all commodities and all countries even when commodities or countries were chosen. Now that’s fixed as well.

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