SDC and data on Initial Public Offerings

A short while ago I helped find data on companies that got listed at a stock ecxchange for the first time. This type of Initial Public Offering (IPO) is called the Original IPO (in the SDC database Global New Issues). After doing a search I expected to see a single record with information on each issue of stocks. The search result, however, showed what appeared to be duplicate records.

After doing some further research I found out why this search result looked this way. The “duplicate” records were not duplicates. The records indicated the specific tranches (or portions) for an issue. In some cases all the stocks were offered in one go, but sometimes companies choose for the stocks to be sold in different markets (or even countries). Below you see an example for the company World Online BV. Different tranches were filed for different markets:

The total number of shares that are offered is higher still in this example. The reason is probably that some shares were offered to private parties first, and the remaining shares were offered for sale on the market(s).

Definitions of ‘Tranches’ are available at Investopedia and Fidelity.com.

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WorldScope coverage update

WorldScope company records now cover annual reports data for (currently) 74080 companies. This includes 46726 active and 27354 inactive companies. This update: 713 companies were added. WorldScope company records are available through Datastream and LexisNexis.

Today I have updated the WorldScope country coverage file and it now includes the latest update as it was posted in the fourth Thomson Reuters Infostream quarterly publication of 2012.

Major updated Countries (new records):
Australia (14)
Canada (54)
China (80)
India (35)
Poland (25)
South Korea (18)
Taiwan (42)
United Kingdom (35)
United States (164)
Vietnam (32)

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Standard & Poor’s website and (no) Indexes

In the past I posted a couple of messages on the excellent S&P Index website. Through this website you could register for free and were then able to find and download S&P Index data for the past 365 calendar days. These indexes included the S&P 500, 100, 400, 600, 900, 1000, and 1500. Sometime during the last couple of months the website was changed and much content was transferred to the new website. If you work on a computer in Europe the website redirects to the EU edition: http://eu.spindices.com/.

Information on the US indices can now be found at http://us.spindices.com/. Unfortunately, the new website no longer offers the option to get daily index data for the past 365 days. If you still want this data you will have to start paying for it and the prices are no joke. Apparently offering some free data to entice customers to pay for more (or longer time series) is an old idea and now a thing of the past.

If the organization where you work can afford an alternative like Datastream, Bloomberg or Compustat North America you still have access to changing index data but it may not be with a frequency that is daily. I posted items on some of these databases at my older blog.

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Datastream & data downloads

Today I noticed that the Datastream Navigator has a small “bug” when it comes to selecting data types in the Datastream Navigator when you want to download data. At first nothing seems wrong and selecting data types goes easy through the Navigator. For example, when I want to download data from the 10 Year US Benchmark bond in this example below. First I search for and click the series I want and when the line turns Yellow I get a small graph and additional information below the list of series (search result). I use the option “more” at the lower right corner of the screen to find out what data types are available for this series.

In the next screen I select a number of variables by marking the squares to the right of the name of each data type. When I am done I click the button/option, called “Use selected” (top left corner of the screen).

When I do this The search screen in Excel shows both the series mnemonic and the mnemonics of the Data types in the first selection field (for series selection). When I run the query, only the default variable is downloaded and I get the following error message for the (other) data types:
$$”ER”, E100, INVALID CODE OR EXPRESSION ENTERED.

The problem can be avoided by first copying the last mnemonics that are added to the first field to the second field (in Excel) for selecting Data Types! When you run the search now, the data is downloaded. See below for an example:

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