The Canary Sings: Using an Internet Tool to Mine for Financial and Business Data at Factiva.Com Victoria A

Shareholder Forensic Analysis Insights

The Canary Sings: Using an Internet Tool to Mine for Financial and Business Data at Factiva.com Victoria A. Platt

With the ever expanding success of Google, the common assumption that everything is available for free on the Internet continues to be prevalent. And, free information may be especially appealing to forensic analysts due to the rapidly increasing cost of fee- based databases. Users of financial data should weigh the costs and benefits of using free information against the cost of fee-based information. This discussion (1) presents a summary of one fee-based database (Dow Jones & Company’s Factiva.com) and (2) compares and contrasts the data available for free with the data provided by Factiva.com.

ntroduction papers, newsletters, databases, magazines, radio, I and television. Content is available on Factiva.com With a market share of 65.6 percent, Google Search from more than 28,000 sources in 350 geographic is currently the dominant search engine on the regions and 23 languages. Internet. Google Search revolutionized Internet search with its PageRank technology. PageRank determines a website’s relevance by the number of pages, and the importance of those pages, that link Excavating the Content to that website. Dow Jones & Company’s Factiva product suite con- With the majority of Internet searchers using sists of the following four components: Google Search, accountants, financial advisers, and n Factiva.com – provides search, alerting, and valuation analysts may easily assume that Google integration capabilities for news and busi- Search is sufficient for conducting their financial ness content. research. Sources include 900 news wires, 2,900 In addition, with thousands of free websites newspapers, 3,500 business and industry devoted to providing financial and business informa- publications, 370 media program tran- tion, a user might incorrectly expect that the data scripts, financial information for more than needed for a comprehensive search are available at 32,000 private and public companies, web no cost. However, the common wisdom of “you get and blog content from more than 4,000 what your pay for” is more accurate. business and news sites, and up to 25 years Dow Jones & Company, a subsidiary of News of historical market data from suppliers Corporation (Nasdaq: NWS), offers historical and Reuters Investor and SunGard PowerData. real-time business and financial information with Search results are available in html, pdf, aggregated content from news wires, websites, news- mobile, or rtf formats.

www .willamette .com INSIGHTS • AUTUMN 2011 57 n Factiva iWorks – combines personalized Fundamentals, Standard & Poor’s Register home pages for personal alerts, newspaper of Executives, and Thomson Financial. articles, and industry magazines with charting capabilities. Factiva.com consists of the following four fea- n Factiva Reader – manages access to copy- tures: righted Factiva news and information and monitors usage statistics. 1. News monitoring and alerting – offers six tools to inform the user of breaking news, n Factiva Select – delivers XML feed to inte- analysis, or special events; news pages, per- grate industry, competitor, and market- sonalized pages, simple personal alerting, related news into applications, portals, or targeted group alerting, flexible delivery, team sites. and rely on expert editors. Clients are able to tag, refresh, filter, 2. Personalization – provides the user with and customize content. The database con- options to create a personal home page, tains more than 600 news wires, 2,500 establish default user preferences, save newspapers, 5,500 business and industry frequently used searches and sources, and publications, 4,000 web and blog sources, create custom news pages from favorite and television and radio transcripts. newspapers or business publications. 3. Company research – retrieves public com- The focus of this discussion is Factiva.com. As pany financial reports, creates company the product is specifically targeted to financial pro- lists for regular searching, provides indus- fessionals, Factiva.com offers content in five key try reports from financial and brokerage areas: experts, charts up to 25 years of market data, provides current and historical n News wires – offers more than 600 con- quotes, and retrieves market data from tinuously updating news wires, including global stocks, market indices, currencies, the exclusive combination of Dow Jones, mutual funds, U.S. government debt, and Reuters, and The Associated Press. An corporate bonds. additional 900 news wires include the Press Association, Asia Pulse, Agence 4. Administrative tools – manages user pass- France Presse, Agencia EFE, the Australian words, administrative permissions, cli- Associated Press, ANSA, and other industry, ent billing options, account usage reports, press releases and local news wires. group or department preference settings, and access links to Factiva.com content. n Newspapers – provides same-day and archi- val coverage of The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Washington Post, The Globe and Mail, the Times, the Guardian, earching for the uggets Les Echos, South China Morning Post, S N The Australian, Sydney Morning Herald, Factiva.com offers three search options. Straits Times, Yomiuri Shimbun, The Irish The first option for basic users combines a simple Times, and local newspapers from around search interface with familiar web tools. Interactive the world. charts and graphs summarize search results to see n Media – provides key television and radio trends and themes within the results. transcripts from ABC, BBC, CBS, CNN, The second option for an advanced users Fox, NBS, NPR, ABS (Australia), CTV, and includes Boolean operators, exclusion filters, cus- Deutsche Welle. tom search fields, date-range searching, and Dow n Magazines – offers general business Jones Intelligent Indexing, a patented taxonomy to and industry publications such as The determine highly relevant results. Search results are Economist, Satellite News, Focus, and displayed in four standard views or can be defined L’Expressand. from up to 38 document fields. n Company, industry, and executives sources The third option for mobile professionals is – provides private and public company designed to simplify the search process and retrieve information from Datamonitor, D&B™, screens on popular devices such as the BlackBerry Freedonia, InfoUSA, IBISWorld, Reuters and iPhone.

58 INSIGHTS • AUTUMN 2011 www .willamette .com Figure 1 Factiva.com Welcome Screen

Figure 1 illustrates the welcome screen to Factiva. As can be seen in Figure 2, the Simple Search com. The user may select from four main tabs: option offers a straightforward approach to creating n Search a search. The three search fields include the following: n Alerts n Sources n News Pages n Key Word Searching n Companies/Markets n Date Range

Figure 2 Factiva.com Search Screen—Simple Search

www .willamette .com INSIGHTS • AUTUMN 2011 59 Figure 3 Factiva.com Search Screen—Simple Search Results Display

The Sources field uses a drop-down menu to focus n Persistent Search Box the search to a specific content type, a Factiva source n Save as an Alert group, a personal source list, or a group source list created by an administrator. The Key Word Searching field allows for entering a few keywords related to the The Discovery Pane provides immediate analysis topic. The Date Range field expands or narrows the of the search results by using charts and graphs and search with a drop-down menu. provides filters to target the results. Figure 3 provides a view of the search results The Post Processing area has nine options for using the Simple Search tab. The display has five displaying, formatting, storing, or exporting the main areas: search results. n Discovery Pane The Content Types area allows the user to read, listen, or view search results by content n Post Processing types: Publications, Web News, Pictures, and n Content Types Multimedia.

60 INSIGHTS • AUTUMN 2011 www .willamette .com Figure 4 Factiva.com Search Screen—Search Builder

The Persistent Search Box is used to modify the Figure 5 provides a view of the Search Screen source selection, keywords, or date selection from results using the Search Builder tab. The display has the results page. six main areas: Clicking on the Save as an Alert option instantly n Discovery Pane monitors the subject going forward. n Toggle between a Frame and No Frames view Figure 4 provides a view of the Search Form n Collapse or expose the analysis of the entire interface. This interface guides the user through Discovery Pane building a search, saving a search, or identifying duplicate articles. n Resize the article frame to maximize the viewing window When using keywords in a search, the Search Form fields include the following options: n Content types n All of these words n Post processing n At least one of these words n None of these words The Discovery Pane provides immediate analysis of the search results in chart and graph formats. n This exact phrase It also provides filters to target the results further. As in the Simple Search results display, there is a Post Processing area that has nine options for Additional fields for narrowing and limiting the displaying, formatting, storing, or exporting the search include a date field, eight Select Sources, search results. and Dow Jones Intelligent Indexing options. For example, users may search by source, company, The Content Types area allows the user to read, subject, industry, region, look up, language, and listen, or view search results by content types: more options. Publications, Web News, Pictures, and Multimedia.

www .willamette .com INSIGHTS • AUTUMN 2011 61 Figure 5 Factiva.com Search Screen—Search Builder Results Display

The user also has the ability to save the search, save full-text) it as an alert, or modify the search. 2. Full-text documents Figure 6 displays the Saved Searches screen. 3. Full-text with indexing From this screen the user can delete, select, or run a previously executed search. As can be seen in Figure 7, the Alerts tab The alerts can be delivered via e-mail in plain offers two options: View Alerts and Manage Alerts. text, HTML format, or to a mobile device. An alert automatically scans incoming news and Additional alert delivery options include the fol- website content based on previously generated lowing: searches. n E-mail Delivery Content Types A user can display the results in one of the fol- n Remove Duplicate Articles lowing three formats: n Bundled E-mail Delivery 1. Headlines and lead sentences (with link to

62 INSIGHTS • AUTUMN 2011 www .willamette .com Figure 6 Factiva.com Search Screen—Saved Searches

Figure 7 Factiva.com Alerts Screen—View Alerts

www .willamette .com INSIGHTS • AUTUMN 2011 63 Figure 8 Factiva.com Alerts Screen—Manage Alerts

n Custom E-mail Delivery Page provides news relating to a specific topic. There are industry, regional, and news subject pages available. Figure 8 provides a view of how alerts are managed. The user can change any option for exist- Factiva.com offers current and historical quotes ing alerts, including delivery, setup, deletion, or from more than 80 exchanges worldwide. Quotes search criteria. Alerts can also be shared with other can be retrieved on up to 20 active instruments at Factiva.com users. a time and displayed as formatted tables or static charts. Quotes are available from one of two pro- There are options to invite users from a sub- viders, Reuters Investor or SunGard PowerData, scribed group, an assigned group, or one managed depending on the security instrument type and date by an administrator. It is also possible to make an range requested. alert private. Figure 11 displays the Quotes screen from the The third of four tabs, News Pages, is an infor- Quotes channel under the Companies/Markets tab. mation portal used to browse the current issues of By using a pull-down menu, quotes can be obtained relevant newspapers and business magazines, per- for the following instruments: form a Company Snapshot, and view Alert results on a single page. A Personal Page can be built for n Publicly traded stocks frequently used Factiva.com features. n Delisted/merged stocks In addition, Group Pages can be created by an n Funds administrator to share information among specific departments or across an entire organization. n Historical corporate bonds (U.S. market only) Figure 9 displays the Personal Home Page from the News Pages tab. Content modules were added n Currencies from newspapers and news magazines covering busi- n Common market indexes ness and investing topics. n Market indexes (including commodities) As can be seen in Figure 10, Factiva Pages are news pages created by Factiva.com editors. These n Unit trusts pages cannot be revised by the user. Each Factiva

64 INSIGHTS • AUTUMN 2011 www .willamette .com Figure 9 Factiva.com News Pages Screen—Personal Home Pages

n U.S. government debt n Date Range n Capital changes n Display Options n Delisted/merged capital changes n Comparison Indexes

Quotes are not available to Individual Subscriber Within the Companies/Markets tab is the Dow accounts (any account opened online with a credit Jones Companies and Executive module. This card). There are several free alternatives from Dow module is designed for targeted list generation, Jones. They include WSJ.com Market Data Center lead qualification, effective call preparation, and and BigCharts. industry analysis. Figure 12 is an example of the Charting screen. The search options include the following: Up to 20 symbols, separated by spaces, can be com- n Monitoring company financial information, pared on a chart. Two charts are generated from news, corporate family history, analysis, and the entered criteria: a line chart and a bar chart. company brands through the Companies Securities in the line chart are color-coded while the tab bar chart is not. n Looking up industry ratios, news, top par- Options for creating a chart include the fol- ticipants, peer comparison, analysis and lowing: profiles, and classification information by n Enter Symbol using the Industry tab

www .willamette .com INSIGHTS • AUTUMN 2011 65 Figure 10 Factiva.com News Pages Screen—Factiva Pages

n Retrieving information on an executive Service and Support by name, company association, position, industry, location, or company size by using Factiva.com provides numerous options for users to obtain search support: phone, e-mail, web chat, and the Executive tab self-service. Learning options include live webinars, n Finding U.S. government officials by self-paced web tutorials, printed reference guides, name, office, or organization by using the electronic newsletters, and face-to-face learning Government tab sessions. Dow Jones Customer Support includes professionals with a diverse practical knowledge from Dow Jones Companies & Executives is a premi- information architects, process analysts, taxonomy um module in Factiva.com, requiring an additional specialists, IT managers, software developers, and license. This premium module was not reviewed for project managers. Additional technical support is this discussion. available to mobile users.

66 INSIGHTS • AUTUMN 2011 www .willamette .com Figure 11 Factiva.com Companies/Markets Screen—Quotes

Spotting a Good Price the number of users, and secondarily by the usage requirements of the organization. Factiva.com offers two types of pricing plans: individual and enterprise. An individual user may sign Factiva.com representatives work with users to up for an annual subscription to Factiva.com. In select the pricing plan that best suits the user’s needs addition to an annual fee, charges for viewed docu- in order to achieve a mutually satisfying agreement. ments and alerts are added to the user’s account as they are acquired. Free Data versus Factiva.com Enterprise subscriptions are designed for orga- nizations with a large number of users—such as Understanding the differences between resources banks, consulting firms, and government agencies. available for free on the Internet and those from The enterprise-wide fee is primarily determined by a fee-based service is what separates the novice from the experienced searcher. When searching for

www .willamette .com INSIGHTS • AUTUMN 2011 67 Figure 12 Factiva.com Companies/Markets Screen—Charting

general media articles, a novice searcher may only database offers a comprehensive collection of global use Google Search. He or she may be unaware that news and information sources in addition to several Google is an advertising-based search engine. proprietary sources. The search results are mathematically calculated The database provides traditional search strate- to favor Google’s clients, not the searcher. By design, gies for the advanced user as well as a user friendly search results from licensed databases are never web-like option. Search results are easily inte- influenced by third-party advertisers. grated into mobile devices or set up in customized Using a licensed database to download data, such alerts. as historical prices for a publicly traded company, When Factiva.com is combined with Dow Jones is always the wiser source of choice. Licensed data- Companies & Executives, the database is an excel- bases provide effective and efficient search options lent single platform aggregator of company, execu- so the user can retrieve data in a preferred format. tive, and industry information. Search results from a licensed database can be rec- High quality industry, market, and company reated, substantiated, and defended. data are usually never free. Forensic analysts If a free website provides incorrect data, the say- who rely on these data should carefully weigh the ing, “caveat emptor,” does little to save the search- costs and the benefits of using free data versus er’s credibility from being weakened. Licensed paid data. database providers remain credible by ensuring the reliability of their data. Victoria Platt is an information spe- cialist with the firm, and she is resi- Summary and Conclusion dent in our Chicago office. Vicky can Factiva.com is a well-organized and user friendly be reached at (773) 399-4314 or at aggregator of news and business information. The [email protected].

68 INSIGHTS • AUTUMN 2011 www .willamette .com