Introducing… Compustat data
06/02/2020

Does your research need in-depth historical financial data for North American companies? Has your supervisor told you to use Compustat data? If so, take a look at the Capital IQ platform.
Capital IQ data includes both quarterly and annual data from Compustat dating back to the late 1970s for both active and inactive companies. You can use a wide variety of criteria – including industry, company account items, financial ratios, S&P indices, etc. – to produce data for groups of companies.
Compustat data is only available for North American companies that have been or are currently quoted on the following US stock exchanges/indexes:
- the NYSE, AMEX, NASDAQ, TSX, or NYSE/Arca exchanges.
- the S&P 500, S&P 400, S&P 600, S&P/TSX Composite or Russell 3000 indices.
To access the Compustat data within Capital IQ, select the appropriate option from the left-hand menu.

You can use a wide variety of criteria – including industry, company account items, financial ratios, S&P indices, etc. to produce tailor-made reports and graphs for both individual firms and groups of companies and export data to Excel.
You can also access Compustat financials from within the Excel add-in by right clicking on an empty cell and go to ADD Formula > Financials > Compustat Financials.
Access to Capital IQ is available here. You will need to set up an account to use it. Find out how in our post on Setting up your account on Capital IQ.
For more information, contact MIRC.
Feature image from Pixabay. Available at:https://pixabay.com/photos/business-stock-finance-market-1730089/
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