Contact Us

4400 Massachusetts Avenue NW Washington, DC 20016 United States

Lab Training & Resources

The FSIT Lab is a value-added teaching and learning tool to enhance students' experience that is paramount to their future work and career.

All workshops and training sessions in the FSIT Lab include discipline-specific instruction and specialized education for students to:

Sharpen financial skills
Deepen business knowledge
Access in-depth research in accounting, finance, economics, and allied fields
Gain a competitive advantage for internships and jobs
Prepare for the professional world

These training sessions and workshops illustrate how to access existing knowledge within various outlets while utilize industry-accepted software applications and databases. Additionally, training will help students to articulate a project agenda and critically evaluate analysis and research reports.

Available Training Sessions

Whether you just want to get started or fine tune your skills, the FSIT Lab will help you with a variety of training opportunities such as:

Bloomberg Jump Start

Bloomberg is one of the premier financial databases that provides extensive coverage of the global financial markets. The ability to access data quickly and to model the data in order to make crucial decisions is vital to all business professionals. Familiarity with Bloomberg terminals will give you a competitive advantage in gaining an elite internship or a job.

Bloomberg Jump Start

Goal: To provide you with knowledge, practical skills and experience in Bloomberg products. This class covers database structure and commands with a focus on real-time and historic pricing, fundamental data, customized analytics etc.

Bloomberg Log On/Log Off
Most Helpful Keys
Data Content/Coverage
News Functions
Equity Functions
Debt Functions
Currency Functions

Bloomberg Equity Valuation

Goal: To help you use Bloomberg power to access information and perform analysis on stocks. This seminar also focuses on advanced equity analytical functions that estimate, from past data, the projected price movement of a stock relative to that of an index or another stock, the intrinsic value of a stock, the risk of bankruptcy, also the implications of changes in capital structure.

Bloomberg Log On/Log Off
Most Helpful Keys
Examine company fillings and "red-line" documents
Analyze benchmark statistics and trace company and peer performance
Perform a financial analysis on a company
Use earnings estimates for a company in one place so that you can quickly gauge market expectations
Analyze an issuer's financial operations
Research equity analyst recommendations

Bloomberg Foreign Exchange Market Analytics

Goal: To introduce you to the FX price discovery and functions related to Spot, FWD, Cross rates and volatilities as well as to ways how to rank currencies to find cross currency investment opportunities.

Bloomberg Log On/Log Off
Most Helpful Keys
Data Content/Coverage
FOREX Market Characteristics
FX Cross Rates, SPOT, FWD, BID-ASK Spread
FX Forecasts
Libor Historical Data
Covered Interest Rate Arbitrage

Thomson Reuters Eikon Investment Management Analytics

Goal: To demonstrate how to enhance the equity and bond valuation process by incorporating Thomson's proprietary ratings and value-added content for making better and faster investment decisions.

General presentation of Thomson Reuters Eikon platform
Monitor analyst and corporate executive activity and assess Thomson's take on stocks in your portfolio or a specific industry/index
Search and generate screening strategies for bonds and credit default swaps
Track current market pricing for selected securities
Assess an issuer, valuation ratios, earnings forecasts, and related equity information
Import, edit portfolios, create portfolios
Create, save alerts on events, transcripts, conference calls

Thomson Reuters Eikon Portfolio Analytics

Thomson Portfolio Analytics is a comprehensive solution that provides industry-leading performance attribution, sophisticated portfolio profiling and powerful risk analysis.

Goal : To build a portfolio, to describe the structure and characteristics of a portfolio relative to a benchmark, and identify sources of risk.

Use Thomson Reuters Eikon for screening stocks based on a set of criteria
Manipulate and model the portfolio using the Thomson Reuters Excel Add-In
Import and edit portfolios in Thomson Reuters Eikon platform
Analyze a portfolio: profiling, risk, return, attribution
Show changes in principal value for your portfolio, summary data for your portfolio and individual security performance.

Thomson Reuters Eikon Jump Start

Thomson Reuters Eikon is a powerful financial analysis database providing a wide range of data for over 80,000 internationally quoted companies. It offers you quick and easy access to quotes, earnings estimates, financial fundamentals, market moving news, transaction data, corporate filings, ownership profiles and research from industry-leading sources:

Thomson I/B/E/S
Thomson Worldscope
Thomson SDC
Datastream
Thomson First Call
Disclosure

Goal: To discover how to use Thomson Reuters Eikon company analysis module to:

Analyze company financial data, share price data and forecast estimates
Locate and download company filings including annual reports, 10-K, 20-F and IPO reports with links to image documents
Analyze company performance against standard/customized peer groups
Analyze performance and constituents of international stock exchange indices
Analyze company mergers & acquisitions activity
News: Global News Coverage Based on Industry or Company
Screening; Quick and Advanced Search

In addition to company analysis, Thomson Reuters Eikon has modules that provide data on ownership, corporate deals, which includes mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and initial public offerings (IPOs).

Thomson Reuters Eikon Peer Ratio Analysis

This Thomson Reuters Eikon training session (Comparables mode) gives you the ability to evaluate, analyze and edit pre-built sets of companies and create reports on items, such as: per share data, profitability, performance, liquidity analysis, earnings growth, comparative financials, valuation metrics, guidance list.

Goal: To demonstrate how to do a peer ratio analysis by pulling live data directly into Excel from Thomson Reuters Eikon as well as how to look for a clear progression from analyzing the historical behavior of key ratios relevant for the firm to those of the industry.

General presentation of Thomson Reuters Eikon
Companies: Overview, Prices, Worldscope data, Estimates, Research Reports
Filings: Overview and Links to Image Documents
Peers: Comparable Reports - Financial, Market & EPS Comparisons
Excel Add-in; Building Reports

Uncertainty and Risk Analysis using @Risk Decision Analysis Software

Many business decisions are based on deterministic figures that have been calculated from an analysis of some kind. Because point estimates are very dangerous, to fully understand the results we need an estimate of the uncertainty related to those figures.

The learning objectives of this training session are to understand how to use the Monte Carlo simulation to carry out uncertainty and risk analysis modeling projects.

With this knowledge students will:

Have a better picture of the project's risk and rewards
Identify those variables that have the greatest effect on the outcome
Measure the effects of different scenarios
Determine the likelihood of the worst scenarios
Increase the probability of making better decisions

Any analysis encompasses four steps:

Developing a model by defining the problem and building a model in an Excel worksheet format.
Identifying uncertainty in variables in your Excel worksheet and specifying their possible values with
probability distributions, and identifying the uncertain worksheet results you want analyzed.
Analyzing the model with simulation to determine the range and probabilities of all possible outcomes for the results of your worksheet.
Making a decision based on the results provided and personal preferences.

Resources

ARGUS Commercial Real Estate

ARGUS models all aspects of the real estate life cycle from initial acquisition, through development, to lease up, and disposition. This software provides the complete solution for managing and growing your commercial real estate portfolio. ARGUS can also be used to value assets, view partnership structures and analyze debt financing.

Bloomberg

Bloomberg is a professional on-line database that provides real-time and historic trading data, analytics and research, and news for global financial markets. The markets include but are not limited to government securities, corporate securities, mortgage, money-market, indices, currency, commodities and equities.

Why use Bloomberg?

Bloomberg is used to monitor the news on a company, industry, economy. It finds stock prices and price information on commodities and currencies, as well as members of S&P 500 or other equity indices. Bloomberg is also used to build and maintain stock/bond portfolios.

The Bloomberg terminals are located in the FSIT Lab and the Mini Lab (Room T-54.)

To launch Bloomberg, click the "BLOOMBERG.INK" icon on the desktop or:
Start > All Programs >Bloomberg.

After launching Bloomberg, you will see the above page, which asks you to login and provides customer support phone numbers.

Create an Account

There are 5 steps to create an account:

Choose a language
Fill in your contact information
Choose your interests and answer if you have used
Choose your user name and password
Verify your information you entered in the previous steps

Now you have created your account and can login, but to get the full functionality, you have to wait until you get a phone call from a Bloomberg representative. Usually, you just need to wait a few minutes.

There are three ways to logoff from Bloomberg:

Typing OFF
Right click and choose EXIT then OK
Press the red DEFAULT key on the keyboard

Securities Data Company

SDC Platinum lets you access Securities Data Company's online databases of financial transactions. It enables you to identify comparable transactions, monitor markets and industries, prospect for new business and evaluate advisors.

SDC provides the following modules:

Global New Issues
Mergers & Acquisitions
Corporate Governance
Corporate Restructuring
VentureXpert
Securities Trading
Industry Specific
Global Public Finance

Standard & Poor's Capital IQ

Capital IQ is an information and research platform for students who are pursuing their business degrees. Capital IQ helps students reduce time spent on coursework and interview-related research and analysis and broaden their universe of potential career opportunities. It is used by over 2,000 leading financial institutions, advisory firms, corporations and universities.

Coverage statistics:

47,000 public companies
12,000 private capital firms
1,000,000 professionals
370,000 transactions
822,000 private companies

Thomson ONE.com Investment Banking

Thomson ONE.com Investment Banking allows asset managers and research analysts to evaluate securities and analyze their portfolios with a solution that combines real-time market data, referential content such as research and estimates, and corporate events, transcripts and company guidance with portfolio analytics and tools in one complete platform.

Company Reviews

Financial data on over 70,000 active and inactive companies globally
Key information to quickly understand all facets of a public company including key ratios, capital structure, latest deals, top holders, events, plus credit ratings from S&P and Moody's (where available)
Data for over one million private companies globally
Private company profiles including business descriptions, private equity investors and fund names, key executives and investment round details

Ownership Tear Sheets

Quickly assess the ownership breakdown of a company with key metrics like float
Review top investors and click through to profiles

Deals Tear Sheets

A quick overview of recent deals including M&A, bond and equity issuance, and syndicated loan transactions
Banking and corporate relationships: easily understand a corporation's banking relationships across all asset classes

Thomson Reuters

Thomson Reuters Eikon is your gateway to finding Thomson Reuters data and news, pre-built screens, and much more …all in an intuitive browser-based interface.

Upon launching the application, the home screen below will provide a snapshot of the current market as well as a breakdown of asset classes and popular links.

In a single view, with Eikon you have access to:

Data from more than 400 exchanges and OTC-traded markets and over 70 direct exchange feeds
Deep liquidity pools, with over 80 providers and more than 1,300 institutional clients
FX market pricing from over 2,000 contributing sources in 175 currencies
Free access to the industry's largest and fully compliant instant messaging and chat network
Unbiased Reuters news, commentary & analysis
Industry-specific, compliant communities and forums led by Reuters editorial teams, to debate and share news & analysis
Specialist equity analytics and research management tools
Expert commodities research & forecasting data
Industry-leading fundamentals covering more than 99% of the world's market cap
Estimates with more than with 40+ years of collection experience, from over 930 brokers and covering
22,000+ companies
Finding information is as easy as A, B, C.

Wharton Research Data Services

WRDS (Wharton Research Data Services) is a gateway to financial, accounting, banking, economics, management, and marketing data accessible through a single web-based interface provided by the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Kogod's subscription includes access to Standard Poor’s Compustat Global and Compustat North America, as well as to CRSP’s daily and monthly stocks.

Compustat North America

Standard & Poor's Compustat North America provides the annual and quarterly Income Statement, Balance Sheet, Statement of Cash Flows, and supplemental data items on most publicly held companies in the United States and Canada. Financial data items are collected from a wide variety of sources including news wire services, news releases, shareholder reports, direct company contacts, and quarterly and annual documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Compustat files also contain information on aggregates, industry segments, banks, market prices, dividends, and earnings. Depending upon the data set, coverage may extend as far back as 1950 through the most recent year-end.

Center for Research In Security Prices

The Center for Research in Security Prices (CRSP) maintains the most comprehensive collection of security price, return, and volume data for the NYSE, AMEX and Nasdaq stock markets. Additional CRSP files provide stock indices, beta- and cap-based portfolio, treasury bond and risk-free rates, and mutual fund databases.

Uncertainty and Risk Analysis using @Risk Decision Analysis Software

Software for risk and decision analysis that works with Excel to provide detailed "what-if?" analysis in spreadsheet models. Widely used in operations analysis, risk management and corporate finance.

@RISK performs risk analysis using Monte Carlo simulation to show you many possible outcomes and tells you how likely they are to occur. This means you can judge which risks are worth taking and which ones to avoid, allowing for the best decision making under uncertainty.

Additional Resources

In addition, the FSIT Lab offers the following resources for business use:

Statistical Analysis Packages

The lab offers the following statistical analysis packages:

EViews
SAS
Stata

Information Technology/Management

The following information technology and management software is available in the lab:

MS Access - Database program
MS Excel - Spreadsheet software
MS Project - Project management software
MS Visio - Microsoft software product for creating a wide variety of business and technical drawings.
Dreamweaver - Web design package
Expert Choice - Collaboration and decision-support software
Certiprep - MS Office training and testing software
iQsystem Exams - MS Office certification exam
LINDO - Optimization Modeling Software for Linear, Nonlinear, and Integer Programming
POM - Product operation management software package

Marketing

Claritas Consumer Point - Geo-demographic marketing research
DirectRT - Reaction time measuring program for lab experiments
MarkStrat - Online learning software for strategic marketing
MediaLab - Questionnaires and multi-media experiments