Big Data for China Stock Market and Accounting Research

Modeling performance of firms in China? Use CSMAR (China Stock Market & Accounting Research) to gather data on China’s stock markets and listed companies.

ProwessDX – A NIFTY Database of India Company Financials

We’ve all heard of the NYSE and the S&P 500, but what are the BSE and the NIFTY?   

The ProwessDX database of Indian Company Financials has a few such unfamiliar acronyms. Once you get past them, you will find the database easy to navigate as well as comprehensive. Prowess is a database of the financial performance of 34,000 Indian companies. The database is updated continuously and typically covers the period 1990 on.

Annual Reports of companies and data available from India’s two largest stock exchanges (Bombay Stock Exchange, BSE, and the National Stock Exchange, NSE) are the principal sources of data. The database includes listed companies, unlisted public companies and private companies. Note: You will need to create a personal login account before searching. 

Search Prowess in Five Steps:

Step 1:  Choose the live (continuously updated) database, or a snapshot from March 2014 or December 2013. Prowess refers to these options as the database’s “vintage”.

Step 2: Select Data. The data may be either a pre-defined set, such as all companies on the Bombay Stock Exchange, an uploaded list of companies of your own choosing, or a created set using database identifiers.

Spelling out some of the acronyms will help clarify the choices in the menu below.

BSE = Companies in the Bombay Stock Exchange

NSE = Companies in the National Stock Exchange

SENSY – Companies in The Bombay Stock Exchange Index of 30 companies

NIFTY – Companies in The National Stock Exchange Index of 50 companies

COSPI = Companies in an Index of 2,312 Companies

A Little Privacy, Please: Finding Private Company Information

The shares of a private company are held by one or a few individuals, and are not traded publicly. In contrast, anyone can buy the shares of a public company. Private companies greatly outnumber public companies. More than 99% of the world’s companies are private.

The Penn Libraries subscribe to several databases with extensive information on private companies. The databases all provide, at some level of detail, company and business descriptions, industry classifications, and executive names. They differ in the range of companies, and executives offered, as well as the financial detail they give. All have distinctive features of value. Over the next few weeks, we will describe several databases that are useful for private company research.

ORBIS

Providing access to more than 100 million company records worldwide, ORBIS is the master index to the Bureau Van Dijk (BVD) suite of databases. The suite draws data from three types of files.

• Subject Related Files: Zephyr for M&A deals, Bankscope, ISIS for Insurance
• Country Specific Files:  including databases such as FAME for the U.K., QIN for China, and ICARUS for Canada and the U.S.
• International Files: OSIRIS, for 70,000 listed companies worldwide

Private Companies with Financial Statements

Most private companies in the U.S. are not required to make their financial statements public.