CapIQ (short for Capital IQ) is a market intelligence platform designed by Standard & Poor’s (S&P). The platform is widely used in many areas of corporate finance, including investment banking, equity research, asset management, and more.
The Capital IQ platform provides research, data, and analysis on private and public companies to help finance professionals perform an analysis. This analysis may support transactions such as mergers and acquisitions, as well as investment recommendations, such as those made by equity research.
Capital IQ can save you lots of time. As a financial analyst, it’s critical to get an analysis done as efficiently as possible, and time is of the essence. Instead of manually downloading an annual report, 10-K, or 10-Q from EDGAR and then manually inputting that information into Excel, it can be much faster to query the data in CapIQ.
Excel plugin
Capital IQ has an Excel plugin that allows you to embed data queries from their database directly into your spreadsheets and formulas. You can pull information such as revenue, EBITDA, EPS, individual analyst estimates, IBES estimates, share prices, balance sheet items, cash flow items, and much more.
Dynamic presentations
CapIQ also has a PowerPoint plugin that enables you to create charts, graphs, and tables that automatically update without having to copy and paste each time you need to refresh or change information. This can be a huge time saver for financial analysts who often spend a great deal of time moving back and forth between Excel and PowerPoint.
Use in financial modeling
Capital IQ is a powerful tool for financial modeling professionals. By incorporating CapIQ’s Excel Plugin with a traditional Excel workbook, analysts can create much more dynamic financial models and build them faster. By incorporating historical company information, combined with equity analysts’ forecasts, it can automate a large part of the financial model building process. CapIQ also offers bespoke templates for the clients, where they can create industry-specific and company-specific models for them.
More financial modeling resources
If your career goal is to be a world-class financial analyst and perform industry-leading analysis, then the CapIQ platform will likely become a part of your daily life.
If you’re looking to break into a career in investment banking, equity research, FP&A, Treasury, or other areas of corporate finance, then our financial modeling courses are a great place to start.