Hi Mr. Book,
I wasn't subscribed to this post and didn't know about your request till I happened to stumble upon this post again today and found out about your question.
Unfortunately, I cancelled my membership from Morningstar soon after this post and joined AAII . At this moment I don't have access to the 165 companies with the widest moat, although I admit looking at the list and reading some 10Ks of some of the companies.
As for your link, Thanks for sharing it. I did read it and I agree with many of author's assumptions. I do not use the screeners blindly but use it as a starting point for research. In addition to the screener, I do use information I find in blogs, news media, 52 week lows list, The VIC etc etc. to find other value ideas.
As for anyone interested in the AAII Screener, I can say that the AAII screener is pretty powerful (although doesn't have Morningstar's proprietary fields like fair value or wide moats etc) and is great. The database of companies in general is much larger than Morningstars and there are tons of criteria to select from. Also, In addition to creating custom screens from the AAII supplied fields, the user can also create his/her own fields(criteria) like P/Tang.book or EV/EBITDA etc if one wants to. Fractions are also supported if one chooses to use them – e.g 0.5*Avg 5 yr. PE.
Since the user uses the AAII screener locally (on his/her computer) and not on the AAII server, every week (Saturday, I guess) AAII updates it database and the user needs to download and install the updated database on his local computer to stay current. The size of the data downloaded is generally large ( tens of MBs) but once installed can result in pretty fast searches.
However, I do have some complaints about AAII in general which, although trivial, are as follows
1. The explanation of each field is not current. The documentation is dated and hasn't been updated since 2005 (if I am not mistaken). New fields which were added after that has no documentation or explanation (so needs to be used with caution)
2. Although most companies have updated financial data, some companies have recent financial data missing. So it's always a good idea to verify whether the data is current. This is my biggest complaint with AAII as it is a paid service and I expect AAII to have their databases current for ALL companies (or at least try to update their database or fix the issue as soon as an user points it out).
3. Customer service is not very prompt in answering mails or fixing issues. After I pointed out that a company had last 2 quarter's data missing, there was no reply from AAII cust. service nor any effort in updating the company's database (even after a month) . Recently, I also sent them an email asking them how one of their fields were calculated (related to point number 1 above) and I haven't yet received any reply from them .
Anyway that's my 2 cents. Hope to read some more from that link Mr Book provided..Thanks
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