Using Datastream to find the dates when a company started or ceased trading

When retrieving financial data for a company or group of companies over a period of time, it can be helpful to know when each company either began or ceased trading. If you are using a group of companies you can use either a pre-formatted constituent list, e.g. LFTSE100, or if you have already created your own list of companies in Datastream, you can use this to retrieve the relevant dates (see our previous post on Creating and using constituent lists for more information).

Once you have your company or your list, follow these simple steps:

1. Open an Excel spreadsheet and click on the Datastream tab or Add-Ins tab > Datastream.
2. From the menu select ‘Static Request’
3. Using either the orange ‘Find Series’ button or the list picker option below, select the list or the individual company that you need the dates for.  In this example I’m using a list I’ve created called FT1002009.LLT.
4. Next select your Datatypes.  The datatypes you need are:
   • NAME – You need to include this or the name of the companies will not be displayed
   • BDATE – this is the base date ie the date from which Datastream holds information about the issue; for the UK the base date is one day before trading in the stock starts.
   • TIME – this records the date or time of the latest equity price data. ie the last date on which the company has traded on a stock exchange.
5. Click on submit.

Your results will be displayed as follows:

Feature image from Pixabay. Available at: https://pixabay.com/photos/business-stock-finance-market-1730089/