S&P Capital IQ vs. Factiva

Best in class tool to source financial data from public companies. Great integration with Excel. Must-have tool for anyone performing financial analysis on a regular basis. Easy to use interface with excellent product support to answer questions about functionality and capabilities. Tool has continued to grow in features over the years and expect to continue in the future.

Incentivized

Factiva is particularly useful when I work on securities litigations involving shareholder lawsuits -- i.e. shareholders who bought and sold shares during a specified class period when the company was misrepresenting, for example, its financials. Specifically Factiva is quite useful in helping me understand what company events were known by the market and when they were known. Factiva has also been useful in helping me on various research studies. It is less relevant for other types of litigation that I work on (i.e. Patent litigation, etc).

Incentivized

• S&P Capital IQ's blackline tool allows for the effortless comparison of changes in company filings over time.
• The screening tool when searching for comparable companies and/or transactions is very comprehensive and customizable.
• It allows users to customize their dashboards and tearsheets in any number of ways.

Incentivized

• Putting broad swaths of news in one place
• Organizing information
• Constant updates

Incentivized

• Sources. In Bloomberg, when you click on a figure anywhere it leads you to the source. That is a great feature, as in finance everything has to be backed with the original source.
• Cannot always find the needed information, the menu is too complex.

Incentivized

• Lengthy setup for searches
• Repeated articles appear frequently
• Unannounced interface changes were unpleasant surprises

Incentivized

[It's the] best ever.

Incentivized

S&P CIQ Pro has great data, however, the new pro version is currently difficult to use given how slow the data is to process

Incentivized

While Bloomberg has a much more comprehensive view of the markets and typically has more up-to-date information in terms of overall news, Cap IQ is easier to integrate into existing financial models, and the formula builder included with the Excel plugin makes it easy to pull relevant financial data as well as update it based on a specific time frame.

Incentivized

Each of the tools I have described share the same kind of premise: the main thing they do is source and collect media content. Then to varying degrees they run filters against this content and produce a range of data visualisations and ways of slicing the data and content. Factiva's strength lies more in the sourcing of content than in the manipulation of the results (much like the others do with more sophisticated dashboards and visual interpretations). We chose it because of the integrity of its sourcing breadth. It doesn't matter so much about the display of results because the source material you're working with isn't as dynamic as say social media.

Incentivized

• The breadth and depth of the company's financial data set are what sets it apart as the finest in the industry.
• Having the ability to pay the monthly fee online is a major benefit. Neither is it very high, but I wouldn't characterize it as low, either. It's quite economical.
• Data quality and accuracy are what set it apart from competitors.

Incentivized