Credit ratings and debt yield. How can I find information about the credit rating of a company using FactSet? Well, there is some information on the snapshot page for credit ratings which you need to scroll down to see. Here we've got the Moody's and S&P general ratings and some more detail about those ratings. But if I want more detail for credit analysis, and particularly their debt yield, if I scroll down the left hand sidebar to the credit analysis section, I can click on the DCS overview and it gives me a little bit more detail. Here we have, again, the credit ratings but below that we have the CDS spreads. On the right it also gives me a clear view of the debt capital structure, and if you scroll down it gives a chart showing the history of the credit spreads. Below that, there are some useful credit ratios.

What is also useful is if I click on DCS detail on the left sidebar, this will give me more detail on the individual issues that the company has outstanding. So for example here, we can see that these are the bonds that Apple currently has in issue and it gives us the balance sheet amounts, the coupon weight, the issue date, and the maturity date. And further to the right, it will give me the yield to worst. So if I wanted to get the cost of debt for Apple using a 10 year yield, maybe for a DCF, then I would go to maturity date that would end 10 years from today, which is going to be 2033. When I look down, there isn't a bond that matures in 2033, but there is one maturing in 2032, and this is the closest and the yield to worst is 4.26%. So we can get quite a lot of detail about cost of debt financing for the company from this section of FactSet. We can also get more detail about the ratings if you select ratings from the left sidebar. This will gimme more detail on the different types of rating, either local currency or foreign currency and short-term or long-term debt. This detail is available for each of the different rating agencies. So this is a very useful section of FactSet for establishing either the cost of debt financing or when looking for ratings in information for credit comps.