Bloomberg Highlights: Round 1

Bloomberg is a key source for current and historical pricing on equities, fixed income securities, foreign exchange and commodities, as well as indicative and fundamental data, customized analytics, and business news. Bloomberg has many supplementary modules that add to its value as a financial resource. This is our first installment of Bloomberg Highlights where we show off some of Bloomberg’s most interesting features.

Bloomberg’s Mapping Module (BMAP)

BMAP allows you to map world wide energy assets (oil, gas fields, pumping stations and pipe lines) and mines (coal, gold and other minerals) as well as individual vessels in ports. Energy assets can be displayed as points on a map or in table format. Below is a map of natural gas pipelines, shown in red, overlaid with US shale basins in blue.

For access, type BMAP and hit the green <GO> key

Supply Chain Analysis

Bloomberg provides data (when available) on a company’s suppliers and customers. Use the SPLC function to locate a specific company’s supply chain.  For example, to find Merck’s suppliers, customers, and peers type the following into the command line:

The Most Interesting Man in the World: Researching Ad Campaigns Worldwide

You may not know Jonathan Goldsmith, but you would certainly recognize him as “the world’s most interesting man.” Dos Equis’ The Most Interesting Man in the World campaign both increased sales of Dos Equis 18% and made Goldsmith a television commercial icon. WARC’s case study “Dos Equis / Heineken USA – The Most Interesting Man in the World” details this commercial’s success, both strategy and results. Take a look at WARC’s catalog of case studies for more examples of successful brand marketing.

WARC (World Advertising Research Center) is known for its database of case studies, articles, news, and market intelligence on advertising.

The text portion of the database consists of thousands of case studies from North America, Europe, Australia, India and China as well as news stories, articles and best practice guides.

The data portion includes:

• Ad expenditures from 1981 to 2011 for 10 mediums in 80 countries
• Quarterly Forecasts for 2010-2013 for 12 major markets
• Global Media Costs
• TV viewing and market shares for 70 countries

“Ad Spend Data” gives the widest view of advertising expenditures by date and country. WARC provides ready-made tables as well as the option to build a custom table. The table below gives the first few annual entries for ad spending in Australia.

Panjiva Panegyric — Resources for Supplier Information

Panjiva is a database of information from 2.5 million product suppliers worldwide. The data comes from U.S Customs and Border Protection (bill of lading shipment records), credit information providers, compliance organizations, trade associations, and more. Its supplier profiles include a company overview, shipment statistics, detailed list of buyers, breakdown of products, and a Panjiva supplier “rating”. Search by product (e.g. snuggie), supplier/ buyer company names (e.g. Microsoft, Ralph Lauren, etc.), and industries (e.g. electronics).

Here is the first page of a search for suppliers of Microsoft.

I Heard It through the Grape Vine – Sources for M&A Rumors

Rumors surrounding merger negotiations may cause legal problems for the negotiating parties. Information leaked from negotiations can lead to accusations of fraud or of insider trading. Despite their potential danger, M&A rumors appear daily in hundreds of news sources. The Penn Libraries subscribe to several databases that allow you to track M&A rumors, and to find the details of the deals the rumors represent.

Below is a description of the “rumor mills” of five databases that cover M&A deals.

All of the databases described are updated continually, are international in scope and have lengthy historical files. The databases differ in the way that they handle rumors. Three of the databases (Zephyr, Thomson One, and FactSet) treat rumors as a description of a deal’s status and allow you to screen on this variable. In Zephyr, for example, you can create a set of all deals using “rumor” as the deal’s status, and combine it with variables for geographic location, time period, industry group, and deal type. Bloomberg and S&P Capital IQ, in contrast, handle rumors strictly as a news story event. Both of these databases index a wide variety of news sources for M&A rumors. However, Bloomberg and Cap IQ can’t easily be used to create a customized set of deals combining the concept “rumor” with other variables.

Zephyr is the M&A module of the Bureau van Dijk suite of financial databases. Zephyr categorizes rumors as “current”, “expired,” “updated” and “withdrawn”. Here is the path for finding M&A rumors on Zephyr:

Advanced Search => Rumors => All Rumors => All Current Rumors

Below is a brief spreadsheet report of current M&A rumors from Zephyr. Many additional columns of information relating to the particular deals can be requested although missing data, such as the acquiror name, is a frequent feature of reporting deals based on rumors.