Are your financial software skills in check?

Finance isn’t just about economic theory, financial analysis, or number crunching- it’s also about data collection. Collecting relevant and accurate data is an integral part of any type of financial analysis to form an opinion. Being able to manipulate that data to display and highlight your ideas and opinions is integral to success in your job. Thus, knowing the right computer applications that allow you to do this is very important and can give you an edge up on the competition.

Microsoft Office- Excel, Access & Powerpoint – obvious, I know, but you wouldn’t believe the number of graduates from other colleges I’ve met who don’t know how to use Excel. Most finance employers expect you to know these applications cold.

Bloomberg Certification – Equities & Fixed Income
This platform integrates data, news, analytics, multimedia reports, e-mail and trading capabilities. For an individual not trained on its logic, it can be quite daunting to navigate.

Capital IQ- this research platform combines in-depth information on companies, markets, and people worldwide with robust tools for fundamental analysis, financial modeling, market analysis, screening, targeting, and relationship and workflow management.

Argus- this platform allows you to do real estate valuation, lease analysis, structure debt terms, conduct portfolio analysis, and do cash flow analysis for development and mixed use real estate.

Northfield Open Optimizer- enables you to input an investment portfolio, and based on the information provided, it will deliver a portfolio that has more return for each level of risk and reflects your preferences and beliefs.

Thompson One Banker- platform providing information on US and international company financials, earnings estimates, ownership, deals (M&A and new issues), annual reports, SEC filings, plus screening tools.

Baseline – this software delivers long histories of key fundamental statistics (15+ years), price action, ratios, First Call earnings, revenues and cash flow estimates, quarterly and annual income statements, balance sheets and cash flow statements for over 9,300 US and Canadian stocks. The information is updated nightly with the ability to also update intraday.

Factset- attribution analysis for investments.

I need your input! Do you have a topic you’d like covered next week in my blog? Email me at ejourdan1@babson.edu with what you want to learn more about!