Finance project report 2

Instructions on how to download data for the FIN 421 Project

Starting from Phase II of the project, you will need financial data for the companies you have chosen for your project. The School of Business subscribes to a data service called WRDS, which is widely used by researchers. You will use WRDS to download data for your companies. Follow the instructions below to download the data:

1. Visit the following URL: https://wrds-www.wharton.upenn.edu 2. Log in using the following information:

Username: fin421fall21 Password: Data for project (note the password has spaces between words)

3. WRDS has many different datasets. You will be using the dataset called Compustat-Annual. 4. There is a very good video that walks you through the process of downloading data from that

dataset. Here’s how you can access that video: Click on the “Classroom” tab and select “Getting Started”. Click on “Video Tutorial”.

5. Watch the video and follow the instructions to find data for your companies. Few useful notes on the same:

a. To get to the page that’s shown in the video, follow these steps: i. Click on the “Get Data” tab on the top and select Compustat-Capital IQ

ii. If it asks you to accept the agreement, then accept it iii. It might show some messages about dataset updates etc., just scroll down and

select “North America – Daily” iv. Then select “Fundamentals Annual”. That should take you to a page similar to

the one you see in that video b. Your identifier will be the GVKEY. c. Choose the date range for at least 5 years. I recommend pull the data for longer period

and you can decide later how many years to keep. d. Keep the Screening Variables as it is. Do not change anything in it. e. In Step 3, you will choose your variables, which are divided into specific categories. One

by one, use the category tab on the top and select variables that you require from each category.

f. Read the entire project description and the details of each phase. Which will help you decide which variables you should select.

i. I am not providing a list of specific variables because I want you to treat this as a real-life scenario where you have to decide which data/information is relevant for your analysis.

ii. But make sure to select the company name as one of the variables. That way you can keep track of the data.

iii. You can also search for the variables by name. iv. As shown in the video, you can click on the icon next to variable name and see

the description of the variable. g. The video also shows you how to submit the query and download the output.

6. You can download the data in Excel and start your analysis