Interested in finance? Test drive a database

Your interest in finance and financial markets could start with your university course, your career aspirations, intellectual curiosity, or a combination of all three. Whatever the reason, take one of the specialist financial databases for a quick test drive and get a glimpse of the world from the perspective of a finance professional.

Current students, and staff, at the University of Manchester have access to Bloomberg Professional from Bloomberg, Thomson ONE.com from Thomson Reuters, and Capital IQ from Standard & Poor’s.

Bloomberg Professional is a great database for getting the professional experience – you just have to think of a large, quoted company, find it and start to browse around. Bloomberg is only available on specific PCs so you have to go to the library.

Once you have Bloomberg running, type the company name in the command line, select the auto-matched series, and choose DES (description) for your command. The screenshot below shows the result for Samsung.

Bloomberg overview description of Samsung (click to enlarge)

If you are unsure where to go on your test drive there are various Bloomberg posts that could give you inspiration.

• Bloomberg – getting started
• Researching a global company using Bloomberg

Thomson ONE.com from Thomson Reuters is not quite as eye-catching as Bloomberg but it does have a web interface, so you can use it from any PC where you have Internet Explorer as your browser and can run the VPN software to access university resources.

Use the search box to find a large, quoted company by name and you get a standard overview report. Explore the different sections of the report and then the different tabs. The following screenshot is for Amazon.

Thomson ONE company overview of Amazon

There are various Thomson ONE.com posts to give you tips. In addition, you can also use one of our library guides to help get started.

Capital IQ, like Thomson ONE.com, has a web interface – you need VPN and a special username and password. Getting started is the same – search for a large company by name and start with the default overview report. With Capital IQ the large list of options to explore appears as a list of headings on the left.

Capital IQ company overview of Wal-Mart (click to expand)

This screenshot is for Wal-Mart Stores (who own the Asda in the UK).

When exploring any of these databases it is best to start with a large company as more information will be available, in general large, quoted US companies as the most studied by professionals are the best.