Screening. Company screening is a key way of using the FactSet workstation to analyze companies in certain industries or when looking at certain indices. To access the screening tool, I'm gonna go to the very top menu and I'm gonna choose screening. And you can see here that there are some suggested screens but generally speaking, you want to use the starter screen. I'm gonna be looking at equities here, so I've got the equity heading but you could instead choose debt if I wanted to run a screen that looked at debt items. I'm gonna choose the starter screen for equity. So this will start off with lots of companies in my list but what I want to do is search for just the S&P 500. So I'm gonna type S&P and that gives me lots of different search results. And I'm gonna choose the S&P 500 index. FactSet is gonna calculate the results and that should then give me the constituent companies in the S&P 500, which, as you can see, it does. There's 500 companies in this list. Now, if I go down and let's say I want to add a column to add extra data for my S&P 500 companies, well, let's say I wanted to add EBITDA estimates for those companies. That would be using FactSet estimates. And let's say I want the mean estimate. I can then also choose the fiscal year of the estimate here. That could be fiscal year one or I could choose fiscal year two. I'm gonna choose fiscal year two and then I'm gonna add new, and that will then add a new column to the screen showing the EBITDA estimates for those companies. So my screen now shows for the S&P 500 companies, for each company, the market value, reported sales and the mean estimate EBITDA for fiscal year two. All of these companies can have different fiscal year ends. So I could potentially change that estimate item to show calendar year numbers if I wanted a comparison.
Now let's remove this and start again and build a new screen. Let's instead assume I want to look at the US software industry. So I'm gonna do a new search in the criteria box and I'm gonna input software. And the top search result shows an industry called software and consulting. I think that's good enough, so I'll choose that. And this gives me all the software companies globally in the FactSet system. And you can see there's lots of companies but I'm gonna want to finesse this. I just want the companies in the United States, so I'm gonna add an extra criteria by typing in United States here. The search results show North America geography as the top item. So I'll select this and this means our screen now has just software and consulting companies in the United States and you can see that this still giving me quite a lot of companies. I've got 1,921 results. I can finesse this further by including only larger companies. So I'm gonna add an extra criteria based on market capitalization and I'm gonna include only companies with a market capitalization larger than $10 billion. Now, this data item is quoted in millions, so I'll input 10,000 here. This now results in 66 companies in my list, much less than before, and that's done by finessing my criteria.
In the results section, I can then again add extra columns, and again, I'll add EBITDA estimates. But this time, let's say I want the data by calendar year. So I'm gonna choose the 2025 calendar year and this time, I'm gonna select the median value and then I'm gonna add that column.
The screen then shows the data just for that set of 66 companies. So that's the screening tool in FactSet, which is very, very useful. There's lots of bells and whistles and finessing that you can do in addition to what we've seen here using the screening tool.
