Acquisitions in cash flow statement showing up as NA

Research
1

Hi All and P123 team -

I noticed that Acquisitions (acquis) are showing as NA for many companies that clearly have had acquisitions in the last few years (eg., MSFT, AMZN)

This is just a heads up.
Also, powerusers, how do i figure out what %age of universe has NAs for a particular financials item? (could be from IS,BS, or statement of cash flows)?

2

Yeah looks fishy. That’s the data we have in the S&P database. For MSFT all empty. For AMZN it looks spotty. But when I check on their workstation capitalIq.com I see values.

I’m asking them

Thanks

3

Thanks Marco. Can someone also please answer the question about % of NAs?

4

Create a screen, put the universe in the settings, put a rule like AcquisTTM = NA, and press the “Totals” button. Divide the number by the rule by the number at the top (in the Totals button).

5

In Compustat , the acquisition line item we use is only for acquisitions of companies , net of cash. The definition is very strict, so if MSFT lumped in other things, like purchases of intangible and other assets, the figure becomes N/A unless it’s broken out somewhere in the filing.

What’s confusing is that S&P’s CapitalIQ.com workstation has values for acquisitions in these cases. That’s because CapIQ has a more broad definition of acquisition. Compustat (data collection) & CapIQ (workstation and data collection) where both purchased by S&P and ultimately there will only be one data collection for all products. Someday.

In other words there’s not much we can do.

On the plus side, I checked Factset data, and they have values filled in :slight_smile:

6 
100*FCount("Sales10YCGr%=NA")/FCount("True")

It’s also worth noting that if you use a node in a ranking system set to NAs negative then, because all tied stocks will receive the highest percentile rank that they’re otherwise be entitled to, every NA stock will get a percentile rank equal to the percentage of NAs for that node.

7

thanks Everybody.