When you first enter Mergent Online, it will default to the Basic Search screen. It lists the parts of Mergent Online you can search. Notice that the default does not include the D&B Private Companies. You can find a specific company by name or ticker symbol. You can also find companies by SIC, NAIC, or MIC or even by index or country. On the same page you'll notice on the right side of the page where you can find country profiles and also a calendar that will show corporate calendar of events like when board calls, earnings, and conference calls happen. There are also tabs for an Advanced Search, Executive Search, Government Filings, Industry Analysis, Independent Research, Horizon, and Investext.
1. The basic search is the easiest when looking for information on a company. Enter the identifyer you have and hit the Search button. So if I want to look for the Ford Motor Company, I can select ticker, type in the letter f, and hit the Search button.
2. On the search results page, click on the name of the company you want to look at.
3. The page that opens up is a brief synopsis of the company. The tabs at the top of the page are the naviagation routes for the various parts of the report. You can find information on company history, joint adventures, subsidaries, long term debt, executives, capital stock, financials including ratios, news, annual reports, competitors, fact sheets, and industry reports.
Advanced search allows you to create a list of companies fitting certain criteria. You can search a specific universe and categories of companies. For example, if you were looking for companies in the motor vehicle manufacturing industry with total assets above $10,000,000, you can do the following:
1. At the top, select which universe(s) that you would like to search across.
2. Now you need to select the criteria to search. The box lists criteria that you can drill down into to select your criteria. The blue navigation bar allows you to switch between the type of criteria -- corporate information, financials, ratios, etc.
3. When you enter one criteria, push the submit button. You'll notice the number of records found will appear after hitting the submit button. Keep adding as many criteria as you want. If you decide against one you can click the little x to the left of the criteria to remove it.
4. When you are ready to see the results click the save or view links. Save will save it as an excel sheet. View opens a list of companies. You'll be able to download from there as well.
You can see executives within a company report. However, if you want to create a list of executives by certain criteria, you can use the executive search. It works very much like the advanced search with the adding of criteria and running a search. For example, if you want to see all CEOs below the age of 35, you should do the following:
1. Make sure to select Executives on the blue navigation bar.
2. Click the + sign in front of age.
3. It will add a criteria for age. The default is less than. So put 35 in the box next to it and hit the submit button.
4. Click the View Link. You now have a list of executives, the companies they are at, title, and age.
5. You can use multiple search criteria including age, bonus, industry SIC or NAICS, and more.
You can also do a search for company filings by company and narrow down by date, or you can search to see what was filed on what day. You can also narrow down by filing type. There are a number of options that works much like the other search features. Reports may be available in HTML, PDF, excel, and/or Word. There is also the ability to select multiple reports and print as a batch.
Industry Analysis allows a user to find industry reports by searching for a company or an industry. The reports can be narrowed down by date and geographic location. Not all regions and time periods are covered in all industries. So you might want to start broad. Reports are available as HTML or PDF. The PDFs are much easier to use. This is a great place to find historical industry reports.
These are Ford Equity Research reports, which covers more than 4,000 stocks using a proprietary quantitative model that evaluates a company's earnings strength, its relative valuation and recent price movement. Ford's five recommendation ratings include strong buy, buy, hold, sell and strong sell. For all stocks in our coverage universe, ratings are generated each week and reflect the fundamental and price data as of the last trading day of the week. Users can search by company or industry or browse.
