I received a really nice email from Professor Richard Price (Richard is an accounting professor at OU) after yesterday’s post. One of the things we discussed in the exchange is the pain associated with entity/security changes etc. Richard brought up a great example, Disney has had 3 CIKS (their current is 1744489, their immediate past 1001039 and their oldest 29082). We added a feature sometime ago that automatically maps whatever CIK you bring to the platform with these others if you specify that you want to include historic CIKs. We did this because some of the tools you use only keep the most current even if we can reasonably conclude that the new entity is the successor issuer. Disney filed an 8-K12B that plainly states This Current Report on Form 8-K is being filed for the purpose of establishing Disney as the successor issuer to Old Disney pursuant to Rule 12g-3(a) when they transitioned from CIK 1001039 to 1744489. As a refresher on this issue please see the news about our 4.0.5 release (4.0.5 Release Announcement). One of the enhancement with the latest version is that you used to have to manually update the mapping file – that file gets updated automatically when you start the application today.

Anyway, Richard made an interesting observation about the need to link the CUSIP-CIK mapping to the historical CIK mapping that I understood but am not sure how to implement. Therefore I decided to make the historical CIK mapping more available. There is another new database available on the platform: CIK_MAPPING. This has the content of the json file we use internally to map CIKs. Richard did not say this directly but I inferred from his comments that this will be useful when CUSIPs and CIKs change. At the present time we are not going to try to modify the CUSIP-CIK file to reflect any information in the CIK_MAPPING file. Both are relatively small and by making those available we are giving you the information you need to review and make the choices that are appropriate for your research.

I hope this is a clear headed example. Suppose you come to our platform with a list of CUSIPs and included in the list is 38259P508. This is the CUSIP assigned to GOOGLE CLASS A. You are sensitive to the fact that this is complicated so you try to match on the first 6 in our database and you find that there is an entry for 3825P706 (GOOGLE CLASS C) and the mapped CIK is 1288776.

So you then run some searches using that CIK and you observe that some observations are missing. So you then take that CIK and investigate the CIK_MAPPING database and you discover that that CIK exists and has a related CIK 1652044.

Well, now this gets interesting – do we have all of the data we need from our original data source (where the CUSIP was the identifier)? We can check because we can use the CIK we just found to see if there is a matching CUSIP.

As you can see there is data, the CUSIP in the image above reflects the CUSIP assigned to ALPHABET INC CLASS C CAPITAL STOCK. So this provides a mechanism/process by which you can be more comfortable about establishing the time series.

I of course understand that you don’t want to work with these one CUSIP/CIK at a time and that is why they are available through the Query tool on the platform. Once again, if you select the database and hit the Execute button without specifying any parameters you can get the entire database available. Use the Save Results button to save as a csv file.

I will observe that these observations are tough to identify, I added a few more today while I was working on this post – and it took three hours to identify the two (really four) new entries. This is not work that can be delegated. Matching CUSIPS to CIKs can be delegated but it is still tedious and it has to be fit in around our primary work.

Notice that I am not that worried about security type – since our focus is on getting access to SEC identifiers from CUSIPs – I know we have cases where the nine digit CUSIP in our database relates to a derivative security (Call/Put) but the six digit maps to the entity. That is what I ultimately care about. It is not perfect but I hope it helps your research