Monday, November 26, 2018

A senior research analyst we know, AJ, was interviewing for a spot at a large asset management company. As part of the process, AJ was asked to “review” a bank and prepare a financial analysis, to present at an interview in two weeks’ time.

At the pension fund where he previously worked, AJ had access to a range of financial data resources including CapIQ, FactSet, and Bloomberg. Now, on his own, AJ needed a way to access significant amounts of data quickly.

AJ, like many others, was accustomed to looking at 10-year history. After all, banks are cyclical, so you want to catch two cycles of information to understand how metrics behave over time. Manually collecting the data would have taken a week (and fingers crossed there were no restatements), which left little time for analysis.

What to do?

Fortunately, AJ had friends at Calcbench. Within two days AJ was able to collect the data he needed for the bank and export it into his model, an exercise that he said would have taken a full week to do on his own. In addition, AJ was able to move confidently into his analysis phase since the data was cleaned and vetted.

AJ — who eventually landed the job — was thrilled. “Using other products like CapIQ, Bloomberg and FactSet, you have to find the data,” AJ said. “At Calcbench, it’s the first thing that you pull up. You can see the financial statement in its basic form, just the way we’re used to seeing it. And it’s in line with the way the company wants you to see it.”

AJ was happy that the financial statements were not “genericized” like some providers offer. He didn’t have to interpret data or determine how to track it. Above all, however, he just saved lots of time.

So what’s this analyst’s plan moving forward? First, get settled in the job. Second, get the word out that Calcbench is a great tool for financial analysis.

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