Reference at Newman Library

Tag: Bloomberg

Sources of historic gold prices for assignment

Last night a student came to the reference desk  looking for data giving the prices of several commodities (gold, any oil) and the CPI for five years for a class assignment due Monday.

She wanted them in downloaded Excel files.  I was able to locate what she needed except for Gold. Although I initially missed “Gold” in the currencies available in Factiva (one can download two years from Factiva), Ryan reminded me it was there. (He was walking by and I asked him.)

I also found, after the student left, that the World Gold Council offers historic gold prices from 2000 (daily, monthly, but not  annually) downloadable into Excel.  Bloomberg, Reuters and Datastream were also mentioned as sources to the student.

Finding Institutional Investor Information for a non-American Company

A patron was looking for institutional investor information about a publicly traded company based in Hong Kong.

After searching in vain using databases such as S&P, Hoover’s, Mergent and even Thomson One I consulted with a colleague.

Linda E. suggested checking Thomson Financial, where we were actually able to find annual reports for the company going back in time.

I referred the patron to the Subotnik Financial Services Center to have a look in Reuters 3000 and Bloomberg Professional.

Out of curiosity, this afternoon Harold and I took a walk downstairs to have a look to see what we could find about it with our own eyes. Sure enough we found more information. Reuters 3000 and Bloomberg Professional allowed us to look at the latest quarterly holdings of the company’s institutional investors.

It turns out the particular company is also in fact traded here in the US, but only on the OTC pink sheet market.

This was a lesson to me that there is a lack of coverage for international companies and pink sheet listed companies in some of our library databases and that both Reuters 3000 and Bloomberg Professional are a good resources for this type of information.

Many thanks to Linda E. and Harold!

Credit Ratings On Bloomberg Professional

The Bloomberg Professional terminal, located in the Subotnick Financial Services Center, has credit ratings on companies including international banks. You will find ratings by Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s, and Fitch (if tracked) for each company.

After you type in the ticker for a bank, for example, you can next type the command, CRPR , to get a credit rating profile. The credit history on these companies seems to go back as far as 10 years.

You can use the command, RATC , to get an alphabetical list of companies with their recent credit rating revisions as well as historical ratings (over 4000 companies). You can then sort from this point on.