Researching… M&A

M&A Specifics

Capital IQ is an ideal starting point for researching M&A, providing access not just to detailed company financials, but also deal specifics for 1000’s of deals globally back to the 1980s. For that reason alone, we would recommend Capital IQ as your starting point for this kind of research.

For deals involving listed companies, the easiest way in is via the ‘Company Overview’ for that firm, pictured below. Choose ‘Transactions’ from the bottom of the left hand menu then ‘M&A/Private Placements’.

To search for deals by criteria, use ‘Screening’ and choose options from ‘M&A transactions’, accessible from the navigation menu at the top of the screen. Select ‘Screening ‘ > ‘Transactions’ > ‘M&A’ from the criteria options to build your search.

Thomson One is also a good place to access company financial information and check out M&A deals. Access Thomson One via VMWare Horizon. More details are available here.

Scroll down within the Company Overview to find recent M&A deals towards the bottom right hand side of the screen. By clicking on ‘more deals’ you can access all the associated M&A deals for the company.

You can also source analysts’ reports from Thomson One. Access these from the Research Reports summary at the bottom left in the Company Overview. These can provide specifics on individual deals. Clicking on the document icon for any transaction will open the deal tear sheet which contains all the published deal information.

Bloomberg also has its own M&A Dashboard where you can search by specifics or simply browse deals by criteria. Access this page using Bloomberg code <MA>. Please contact MIRC for access information.

Background information

Once you have worked your way through the data available in Capital IQ, Thomson One and Bloomberg, MIRC has a variety of other resources that will also be valuable in your research. These include:

• Background information such as company and industry profiles and reports from sources like MarketLine Advantage, IBISWorld and Factiva.

• Stock market data including share prices and indices are available from both Bloomberg and Datastream via Eikon. Bloomberg’s charting function is fantastic so please ask if you need help creating any graphs.

• Brokers and analysts’ reports are essential reading from the point where a deal was rumoured until well after the completion date. What else was happening at that time? Was there interest from other companies? Bloomberg contains some analysts’ reports but for more comprehensive coverage, Thomson One is best. Please contact MIRC staff for further information.

• The national press will also be a valuable source of information. Check out Factiva for coverage in newspapers worldwide.

• SDC Platinum (contact MIRC for further information) contains the most comprehensive deals dataset available with data back to the 1950s. It is a resource which is more suited to large scale ‘number-crunching’ and therefore more suitable for gathering data for a thesis or research purposes.

As ever, any questions, please pop in or contact us here!

Feature image from Pixabay. Available at: https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2015/11/26/07/47/hands-1063442_960_720.jpg.