ValueLine - Do they have valuable data?

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Value Line is a public company. I spent some time doing some research on Value Line, using my favorite investment research platform, Finchat.io (We are investors at Social Leverage). It had just under $40m in revenue in 2023 and is traded on the Nasdaq. It pays just over 2% in a dividend yield and has a market cap of $414m

The principal investment service of Value Line is its Investment Survey. They cover 90 industries and they market it as a product for risk-averse investors who prefer stocks of large, well-established, and stable companies. Prices for their digital offerings range from $49 to $795. For the high-end product you get performance ranks, ratings, commentary on buy/hold/sell, 7 model portfolios, a screener for saving up to 10 saved searches and a access to creating 3 watchlists with 50 total tickers. Seems a bit odd reviewing the product that they market the limitations of the number of screens you can run/save and how many tickers can be in a watch list. There is also alerting functionality but that is limited to. Lastly, you can chart up to 25 companies.

This is what the product looks like on their website:

The print edition of their offering is $199 to $598. The fact that they are still doing print is somewhat surprising. Diving further on Finchat.io , “According to Value Line, Inc.'s 2023 Annual Report, the company generated $9,963,000 in revenue from print publications during the twelve months ended April 30, 2023. This represents an 11.5% decrease from the $11,253,000 in print publication revenues during the twelve months ended April 30, 2022.”

There are then some Options surveys and ETF data along with more digital and print options. Overall lots of investment research. The deep history of the firm, having started in 1931 by Arnold Berhard, makes what they have potentially compelling and valuable. How they store their data, if they have an API for their research feed, and how they have upgraded their technology over time are still question marks to me. I would think there could be some interesting opportunities to license their data to both LLMs that are building finance-specific products as well as selling data to the large financial industry.

Value Line is one of those old investment research companies that you wonder if they put a little money and effort into innovation, could they reposition the asset as a bigger opportunity? Modernize with AI. Invest in delivering their data and newsletters with modern platforms. Tuck in other data assets. Bring on some expertise at the board or advisory level to really push them forward and build this into a multibillion-dollar organization. Lots of questions on what could be……