MGT 185: Investment Banking: Company Shapshots

MergentOnline

Mergent provides detailed information about U.S. and International public companies. Like ThomsonONE, it has links to SEC filings and provides historical stock prices, board and ownership details, significant events, capital changes and debt details. Additional features include research reports and tools for comparing your company’s performance vs. its peers. This database is the easiest place to get a company’s financials across multiple years.

Click any image below to see the detail enlarged.

Screening: Pick a Company

Both Refinitiv Workspace and Factiva are better starting points if you have no idea what company you want to research, because they have better browsing of news.

However, Mergent is excellent if you know a company, or want to browse for a company using links to competitors until you find one you like.
 

• Option 1: change the Basic Search (landing page) criteria - use an SIC, NAICS or Mergent code for your industry, and/or choose a country. For example, look at all the US companies traded on the New York Stock Exchange in your choice of industry that are on the S&P 500 Index.

• Option 2: use Advanced Search to limit by even more criteria and keywords.

• Option 3: use the Government Filings tab to browse by various criteria. For example, show me all the North American companies who filed a report today that recorded insider trades.

• Option 4: look up a known company and check out its competitors.

Get a Company Overview

In Basic Search, input your company name or ticker symbol. The results open on a company synopsis which summarizes the company's key identifiers, location, industry code, market cap, key shareholders and number of employees. Parts of the synopsis also include:

• business summary
• price summary
• key executives
• key financials
• company news and corporate events

Notice that there are other menu choices on the Synopsis to more in-depth info on the business history, financial highlights, business segments, properties, subsidiaries, long term debt, capital stock. Click the image to see the details.

Example of a complete company report.

Get Company Financials & Identify Competitors

Mergent's strength is in how you can export financials and analysis. You have options:

• Option 1: easiest - use the Company Financials tab and make your selections.

• Option 2: medium effort - use the Report Builder tab and make your selections. You have more control over the look and what's included in the output.

• Option 3: medium/advanced effort - use the Competitors tab

  • step one, choose US or Global companies
  • step two, customize your competitors list
  • step three, click "add all to company analysis list", then navigate to company analysis list
  • step four, populate your companies; then populate your report items (financials, stock performance

Charting: Graph Historical Stock Performance

To get an individual company's chart, do a search on the company, and go to it's Synopsis page.

• Look for the part called Pricing Summary
• Change the Time Period dropdown to 1 year (or pick from another time frame provided there)
• To get a nice screenshot, click the Printer Friendly icon at the top of the page
• To get an export of the chart graphic in Excel or Word formats, path: Report Builder tab > Custom Reports
  • Expand the Company Details section
  • Click Synopsis and select time period you want, then click the right arrow to add this element to the report items list
  • at the bottom of the page choose your export format (Word and Excel are cleanest options) and create your report.

NOTE: Mergent's charting features are more limited than Refinitiv Workspace's or Factiva's. Use one of those if you want more control over your chart outputs..

Ownership Details

Mergent does these tasks very easily:

• determine what percentage of stock is owned by management and Board of Directors.

• create a list of the largest shareholders

• gather management compensation data

Step 1: Path > Company Detail > Ownership tab > Insiders link

• provides a holdings summary of shares held with pie chart
• shows detailed pie chart of top insider holdings by percent
• scroll down the page to get the list of all executives and directors and their current holdings
• all of these are exportable; see image for detail

Step 2: Path > from the previous step, look under Filer's Name (the list of holdings by executives and directors)

• click the links to any executive or director to get detailed compensation information

Mergent also offers two additional kinds of holdings information: Institutional holdings and insider trades

• institutional holdings

  • provides summary of % of institutional holdings and changes in position
  • lists top shareholders by name, with clickable details about the investor's other holdings
     

• insider trades

  • charts activity by number of shares over a specific time frame (up to two years)
  • provides a summary table of the direct transactions
  • lists each transaction by filer's name

 Factiva

Well-known for its business news (both domestic and international), it also contains company profiles and research that you can use to study public companies for this course's assignments. The company profiles bring together in one place financials, SEC filings, ownership, deals and news.

Note: Once you are signed in to the UCSD instance of Factiva, the landing page contains Top US news feed of the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post and the major US regional papers. Simply scroll down to view what's there.

Screening: Pick a Company

Option 1 – if you know a company, use Path: Companies/Markets > Company to search and look it up.

Option 2 – you can browse by large industry categories. Path: Companies/Markets > Industry and pick a category. From here, the most useful way to browse is to look at the companies listed in the Discover pane or choose Peer Comparison. Remember: choose a U.S.-based, public company in a fairly large, well-established industry.

Option 3 - browse the News Pages section by searching in the box label "Search this Newsstand" on: mergers and acquisitions. In the results, browse the left nav bar - for company names and/or to limit by Region: US.

TIP: You may find a company quickly, or have one in mind. Or, you may wish to work up a short list of a few company names, then move on to the next step, "Get a Company Overview," before you decide on your main company.

Get a Company Overview

Look up a specific company and then you'll get the profile with the Business Description, Performance/Segment Information, Stock Price Activity, Key Executives, Key Financials, Peer Group and more. Look on the left nav bar and choose items like Key Developments, which offers a drop down with options like: Mergers & Acquisitiosn/Ownership Changes, Corporate/Management Changes, and Funding/Capital.

Also use this section to know your company better and find comparable companies in the "Key Competitors" section.

The Reports section lets you export profiles. Here's an example of a complete report.

Get Company Financials & Identify Competitors

Factiva has 5 years worth of financials.

TIP: choose Show Details to get the most granular report categories. Spreadsheet link enables export.

Limitations:

• you can only export one company at a time (the Company List features are disabled).
• If you want full control over your data export (e.g., your base company plus all your competitors; you want to specify which elements of a financial report to export), then use Mergent Online

Use Peer Comparison to identify peers. If you need control over which peers, again, change over to use Mergent Online.

Charting: Graph Historical Stock Performance

Path: Company Snapshot > click on the chart in the section called Stock Price Activity.

You may chart multiple companies at once

You may save your chart by using the Print symbol (bottom left of screen) and save to PDF option.

Factiva's charting feature has fewer chart settings to control than Thomson ONE, but the graphic output is nicer.

Ownership Details

The ownership section here has fewer details than in ThomsonONE - one year's worth of insider ownership (only as shares outstanding and % held).

It does have institutional ownership details

To export, use Reports (left nav bar) > and choose custom report - then include elements like Ownership, News: ownership changes and Key Developments: ownership/management changes