Industry

Perform an industry comparison across the companies specified by the user: $ARGUMENTS

The user will provide multiple tickers separated by spaces (e.g., "AAPL MSFT GOOG AMZN").

Before starting, read ../data-access.md for data access methods and ../design-system.md for formatting conventions. Follow the data access detection logic and design system throughout this skill.

Follow these steps:

1. Company Lookups

Look up all provided tickers using discover_companies. For each company, capture:

• company_id
• latest_calendar_quarter — use the earliest latest_calendar_quarter across all companies as the anchor for period calculations (see ../data-access.md Section 1.5)
• latest_fiscal_quarter
• Note each company's fiscal year end — this is critical for calendar quarter alignment
• Firm name for report attribution (default: "Daloopa") — see ../data-access.md Section 4.5

2. Comparable Financial Metrics

Calculate 8 quarters backward from the anchor latest_calendar_quarter. For each company, find and pull these metrics:

Income Statement:

• Revenue
• Gross Profit / Gross Margin
• Operating Income / Operating Margin
• EBITDA (if not reported, compute as Operating Income + D&A — label "(calc.)")
• Net Income / Net Margin
• Diluted EPS
• R&D Expense
• Stock-Based Compensation (SBC)

Cash Flow:

• Operating Cash Flow
• CapEx (Purchases of property, plant and equipment)
• Free Cash Flow (compute as OCF - CapEx — label "(calc.)")
• D&A (needed for EBITDA calc if not directly reported)

For any derived/computed metric, mark it with "(calc.)" so the reader knows it's not directly sourced.

3. Company-Specific KPIs

First, think about what KPIs matter for the specific industry being compared. Use the full sector taxonomy to guide discovery:

• SaaS/Cloud: ARR, net revenue retention, RPO/cRPO, customers >$100K, cloud gross margin
• Consumer Tech: DAU/MAU, ARPU, engagement metrics, installed base, paid subscribers
• E-commerce/Marketplace: GMV, take rate, active buyers/sellers, order frequency
• Retail: same-store sales, store count, average ticket, transactions
• Telecom/Media: subscribers, churn, ARPU, content spend
• Hardware: units shipped, ASP, attach rate, installed base
• Financial Services: AUM, NIM, loan growth, credit quality metrics, fee income ratio
• Pharma/Biotech: pipeline stage, patient starts, scripts, market share
• Industrials/Energy: backlog, book-to-bill, utilization, production volumes, reserves

For each company, discover and pull the most relevant KPIs. Note which KPIs are common across the group (apples-to-apples comparison) and which are unique to specific companies. For mixed-sector comparisons, focus on the KPIs that apply to the largest revenue segments of each company.

4. Normalize & Compare

• Calendar quarter alignment is critical. Ensure all companies are compared on the same calendar quarters. Note each company's fiscal year end and map fiscal quarters to calendar quarters.
• Build side-by-side comparison tables
• Calculate margins for ALL 4 recent quarters (not just the latest) to show trends
• Calculate YoY growth rates for each of the last 4 quarters

5. Ranking & Analysis

• Rank companies on each key metric (revenue growth, margins, FCF yield, etc.)
• Identify the leader and laggard for each metric
• Flag notable outliers (unusually high/low margins, accelerating/decelerating growth)
• Note any divergence in KPIs or business model differences
• Compute R&D as % of revenue and SBC as % of revenue for each company — these reveal structural differences in how each company invests and compensates
• Show YoY segment growth rates for the most recent quarter, not just absolute segment revenue
• Flag one-time items that distort any quarter's comparison