Investment Banking Interview Research: Capital IQ

• From the Companies Tab- Select Screening, then Transactions. Look under General, you will want to look into Financial Advisors.
• Under General Transaction Details, select Advisors and Fees. From this screen you can select particular financial advisors. In this example, we use Jeffries, a medium size financial advisor. You can select the parent company, and then add it to your filter.
• In the next tab, select Financial Advisor. You could also select Placement writer or underwriter if you want to see what happens and if it brings up different results. You can leave the fee information blank as a criteria in this case. Click View Results.
• This brings up results. If you have fewer than 10,000 results you can download them in Capital IQ, but it’s a lot to review, so we suggest filtering the view further by date. To do this you can go back to View Criteria and run for a limited date range, for example deals in the past 2 years. You could also add criteria under Company Information, for example if you are only interested in technology companies. If you want to add criteria due to company details you could limit by Industry, for example here is the process for adding criteria of technology companies. It lowers the amount of records substantially.
• You can then view results, in reverse chronological order, indicates the status of the deal, the issuer, and other information. From here you can choose Add/Edit display columns to customize what you see. Go too Add/edit, then go to Browse.
• From here, we suggest adding “Transaction Comments” under Transaction details/General Transaction Details, which will be a sentence or two about the deal and may give some needed context.
• You can also find out who the financial advisors are on both sides of the deal by selecting Transaction Details, then Transaction Advisors. You can also find out more about where a company mentioned is based by selecting Company details, then Country of Incorporation and also Primary Address.
• Once you are happy with your columns, click View results and then export to Excel to work with the data.

Screenshots of the Search in Capital IQ. Click to open each image in a new tab to see a larger version with highlights.

Step 1: Go to the Companies tab, then select Screening, then Transactions. 

Step 2: Choose Advisors and Fees under General Transactions

Step 3:  Choose a name and select financial advisor as role

Step 4:  Add additional criteria like industry classification

Step 5:  View Criteria

Step 6: See and view results. Customize your view, and choose Add/Edit display columns.  We suggest adding "Transaction Comments" under General Transaction Details.

Step 7: You may want to add location details

Step 8: Once you are satisfied, you can view results and export to formats like Excel.