Market and industry research

Mergent Online

In Mergent Online, you can find financials and ratios for publicly traded companies and you can create comparison reports of financials and ratios for competing companies.

To find financials and ratios on a single company, enter the company's name on the left of Mergent's home screen:

Creating custom comparison reports of competing companies requires more steps. For guidance on that:

• We have another guide specifically about using Mergent
• And we have the video listed below

If you have any questions, follow up with a Royal Roads Librarian

Investext is a database of company investment reports produced by investment banks, brokerage houses, research firms and others. The reports cover areas such as company performance and trends, board changes, mergers and acquisitions, and company valuation.

Investext is available through the Mergent platform, on the far right of the screen.

You build up your searches step by step in Investext. You will probably want to begin by selecting a company and then add filters such as country, industry, report type or many others. Because each new element added to your search makes your results more specific, you will probably need to delete recent elements - backtrack - and try a different path if you are not finding what you need.

Usually you start by selecting your company:

Then filter by another category, making sure to take advantage of the look up features. There are a few categories where the lookup feature is useful. This is just one example:

If you cannot find anything this way, you can try keyword searching all the reports about your chosen company.

To look through your search results, click on 'View' on the right side of your results.

If your search is not providing good results, try deleting the most recent elements of the search and testing something else.

It can be challenging to find information about Canadian private companies as they are not required to make financial data publically available. 

Here are some tools you can use to piece together a profile of a private company.

1. The company's website

• Look for links to newsletters, news releases, a blog, twitter feed or any other communication outlet that provides information about the company.
  What is the product or service?  What technology does the company use? Are there any issues (political or economic) facing the company?

2. Industry Canada

• Industry Canada's website is a good general source of Canadian industry statistics and sector reports.
• Industry Canada also has Financial Performance Data (formerly the SME Benchmarking Tool).

We have an industry research guide for additional suggestions.

3. Find articles specifically in journals, trade publications, or newspapers

Please see the following section of this for tips on finding articles.