Key Resources
INVESTOR RELATIONS departments of publicly traded companies will often have a website with SEC filings, annual reports, presentations (including earnings calls), and press releases. This is an excellent starting place when researching a company. Find the investor relations website by searching the internet with the company name and the phrase "investor relations".
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Capital IQProvides financial information on more than 42,000 public companies. Easy-to-use tools for financial statement analysis, peer analysis, and charting.
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Mergent OnlineCovers public and privately held firms. Includes company histories, financials, filings, and equity analyst reports (Investext tab).
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OrbisExcellent company coverage of both publicly traded and private firms around the world.
Other resources
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Bloomberg ProfessionalAvailable in Hotel, Management, and Mann libraries, the Bloomberg terminals provide up-to-the-minute news and prices from financial markets around the world. Offerings include 24-hour historical and 15-minute delayed securities pricing, news, data, and analysis on companies, markets and economies. Coverage includes equities, money markets, currencies, bonds, commodities, mortgage-backed securities, and derivatives.
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EDGAR (SEC filings)EDGAR, the Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval system, performs automated collection, validation, indexing, acceptance, and forwarding of submissions by companies and others who are required by law to file forms with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Since May 6, 1996, all public domestic companies were required to make their filings on EDGAR, except for filings made in paper because of a hardship exemption.
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Seeking AlphaSeeking Alpha is a platform for investment research, with broad coverage of stocks, asset classes, ETFs and investment strategy. In contrast to other equity research platforms, insight is provided by investors and industry experts rather than sell-side analysts. Excellent source for earnings call transcripts shortly after a call for more than 4,500 companies.
Primary vs. Secondary Sources
Primary sources are first-hand historical evidence or an original account of an event, especially used as research material (Canadian Oxford Dictionary, 2004). Examples include registration statements, prospectuses and annual reports filed on Form 10-K, and earnings call transcripts.
Secondary sources are analyses and interpretations of primary sources and events. Examples include company profiles, SWOT analysis, and analyst reports from banks.
Note that many company financials can be downloaded "as presented" in their filings or standardized to a data publisher's template. Think of the as presented data as primary source and the standardized as secondary source.
| Pros | Cons | |
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| Primary |
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| Secondary |
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Factiva Tips
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FactivaFull-text online service for international news and business information. Covers over 28,000 sources in 23 languages in more than 150 countries. Some company and market research is included. Factiva includes full-text coverage of the Wall Street Journal.
Factiva is a powerful way to search multiple news sources at once for company and industry information. It is ideal for gathering background information on your company and learning about what issues they are addressing, their strategies, and products.
Factiva allows you to narrow search results to specific types of content. For example, set the subject to Transcript to filter for earnings call transcripts and interviews. Below are some guidelines for creating a targeted search in Factiva which will allow you to weed out extraneous results.
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For Articles Containing |
Enter |
| Both the word Nokia and the exact phrase emerging markets. |
Nokia and emerging markets |
| Either Michelin or Firestone. |
Michelin or Firestone |
| At least 5 mentions of Microsoft. |
atleast5 Microsoft |
| Vodafone in the same paragraph as telecommunications. |
Vodafone same telecommunications |
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President within 3 words of Obama, where Obama is the third word (there can be 0-2 words between), and the terms appear in that exact order. You must enter a number with this operator, between 1 and 10. |
President w/3 Obama |
| Any words that begin with telecom. You must use at least 3 characters before the truncation (*) sign and it must be used at the end of a word only.
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telecom* |
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Either globalization or globalisation, or other wildcard spellings. |
globali?ation |
| The words U.S. stock market and word count greater than 5,000, to identify longer articles about the stock market. Do not use commas in large numbers. |
U.S. stock market and wc>5000 |