Financial Databases and Research

Company identifiers & databases

When you are doing research and need financial data on companies it regularly happens that you need more than one database to get all the information you need. The problem with finding financial information from more than one database is, that you need information which uniquely identifies the same company in those databases. Two problems occur:

databases do not always contain the same identifiers to search with or to download together with the financial data
the available identifiers are not always the same or as unique as you might think.

The first problem cannot really be solved through the databases you have used. You will have to try find a common ground through either a third database which contains all necessary identifiers or by trying to combine data sets using a less uniquely or uniformely available identifier like the company name.

The second situation is more difficult because it is not always obvious or known. Always try to find out information on the available identifiers. Example: the Sedol code of a company is the code which it gets when the company is listed at the London stock exchange (LSE). When a company is delisted from the LSE the code is sometimes removed from a database. This is done because the Sedol code sometimes is reused for new companies that are listed at the LSE. Historical financial data from more than one database should therefore be combined using the Sedol code only with caution.
The following codes, if available, are a better choice: the CUSIP code or the ISIN code. More information on available identifiers in several databases, together with some descriptions are available in the files:

Company Identifiers.pdf

Company Identifiers-databases.pdf

Author information: LinkedIn

10:35 PM - 8 June 2008

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