Good evening. Is there anybody that can recommend a way for the little guy to access computation data back to 1964? If I’m investing $100k it’s going to be hard to subscribe for 20k. I have some screens, but would feel much more comfortable with a longer backtest before contributing a large chunk of capital.
I live near Ohio State. It might be worth signing up for a class to try to access through their library???
I’ve accessed it through the University of Illinois. Unfortunately they didn’t have the point-in-time database and there wasn’t much to work with before 1999. Maybe it’s different at OSU. I’d rather save the trouble and use P123.
I’ve always been curious - why does the data in P123 only start in 1999? Obviously, more history would be better, but is it a matter of cost or lack of good data?
Compustat didn’t always do point-in-time (PIT) and had to back-populate their database by buying back their owned data from Charter Oak who had formatted and maintained it as PIT. A lot of data becomes less granular the further back you go, so at some point you may only have quarterly or annual data (way back) and also less detailed reporting of IS/BS/CFS items.
For big picture, long-term system research check out the Fama-French data sets.
Compustat is 1000/m
It’s too bad about the cost and lack of good data, because I would guess that many value-based systems did not do well during the tech bubble. And a small cap bias may not have worked well either. It would have been nice to backtest during that environment, which we may see again at some point.