Are you willing to help a newbie get some data?

[dajdouj]

Hi!

This is my first post here and I know that it is not nice to start off with a request, but desperate situations require desperate measures. I hope this is not much of an inconvenience.

I have six-digit cusips of around 1600 companies and need to retrieve data about the bonds issued by these companies from 1995 and up. Such information should include for each company its different bonds, id info for each bond (type , interest, maturity etc..) and most importantly daily and monthly returns (change in market price) on each bond for the specified period!

I do not have access to any good database but was told that such a task can be accomplished with a few commands and should not require a long time to do.

I would strongly appreciate any help. If you can't help then may be you can point me to an online service that can provide such data even upon payment (but a reasonable payment, my means are very limited!!).

Thank you very much,

Dajdouj

 

[daleholborow]

dajdouj

check around on this forum, there are a few lists of free data and indeed someone just asked about free bond data recently.

If you want information on US companies/bonds, then I believe yahoo.com actually features a bit of this information. In fact:

http://finance.yahoo.com/bonds/composite_bond_rates

Hunt around there, it might be a good start, depending on exactly what information you are after. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that even with access to a fully-fledged product (such as Bloomberg, Thomson Datastream or CompuStat) with an account such as the subscriptions typically used at a university, you would probably still struggle to find good data easily, especially if you wish to branch out beyond the USA market. Trust me, I've tried.

Good luck.

 

[dajdouj]

Thank you daleholborow for your interest. Unfortunately I have already gone down the free data road and had tried most sources that were listed in threads in this forum. It turns out that it is quite hard to get free historical bond pricing data (and yes, I have both US and non-US companies in my list).

My guess is that the only option left for me is to find someone who has access to a full subsciption to datastream or compustat and who can run the data request for me.

So, anyone out there ?

 

[Andy Nguyen]

Firstly, does your research's success hinge on the full and complete data as posted?
I would venture to say that it's close to impossible to get complete data for 1600 cusip from 95-now even with access to some database.
Each database will have part of 1600 and it's a drag to compile the required fields with the cusip. I can even imagine there are lot of time gaps for any given bond.

Would it be possible to modify your research to use a fraction of these 1600 bonds to say a hundred or two?

 

[dajdouj]

no it doesn't. Let me be more specific, may be it will help you help me ! : what I have is a very very long list of cusips of companies which were involved in M&As either as targets or as acquirors from 1/1/1997 until 12/31/2006. I do not have a list of the cusips of the actual bonds issued by these companies, and most of them probably don't have any or do but are not available on databases. what I need is some sort of batch command to run through all the company cusips, find out which bonds issue by each company are available and then retrieve this information about each bond:
-Type of bond-Type of Coupon, frequency...-Face Value-Coupon Rate-Currency-Return (both monthy and daily) -CUSIP of issuing company-embedded options, etc.

I was told that such a batch command would be an easy thing to run for someone who has access to a database , but I'm not so sure of this now !

So basically, I'm starting with a huge list only because I expect the data to be unavailable for most of these companies. After filtering out the invalid entries (ones with gaps, etc ) , I'll be lucky if I end up with a few hundreds!

 

[Uncle Max]

It possible to find bond descriptions like coupons, maturities etc. But it's impossible to find daily returns. If those bonds are not Treasuries they are not actively traded. And services like Bloomberg will probably quote daily prices, but you will see that almost 100% of bonds are priced at par.

 

[daleholborow]

I was told that such a batch command would be an easy thing to run for someone who has access to a database

Without meaning to sound rude, whoever told you this is leading you somewhat astray.
I had access to all the systems i mentioned earlier (Bloomberg, Datastream and COmpuStat) and still had great difficulty getting any decent data out of them for bond issues.

Yes, you can RUN the query easily enough, in the same way you can type a search word in Google easily enough... but will the results be what you were expecting or hoping for? That, unfortunately, is probably highly unlikely.

Consider that when i was doing my research, i originally intended to automatically run tests over 100s of bonds based on data dumped out of those financial systems. Instead, when i started, i found it more or less impossible to get decent datasets and/or sizeable samples (see my other posts in this forum regarding Datastreams inability to map bonds with issuers), and THEN i noticed tht other researchers talked in their published papers about having retrieved their data from various printed publications! Eeeeeeekkk.....

 

[dajdouj]

Hmm, this is turning out to be much much harder than I thought! Thanks a lot everyone for your valuable opinions. I'll keep looking and will post a reply here if I ever find a way to get historical return data on bonds !!!!