Original question

Summary posted 7/14/2003 by Timothy M. Hurley, thurley@graycary.com

See also: Acquisitions candidates and M&A cost savings

Here is a list of the responses I received regarding vendors who sell information on M&A deals ranked by monetary value, industry, type of deal, etc. - similar to Thomson, but maybe less expensive, or more flexibility in pricing and subscriptions.

1) Each file on Dialog has a corresponding "Bluesheet". A Bluesheet is a Dialog document that is very specific in describing key information about the database. Attached you will find the "Bluesheet" for Thomson Financial's "Worldwide Mergers & Acquisitions" database. As you can see, this M&A file is updated daily and has over 60 data points indexed in each record. The benefit to this amount of indexing is that you can download any number of indexed elements (at a cost per element) into an Excel spreadsheet.

2) Pete Donnelly from Alacra wrote: I have this web-based tool that integrates Thomson and Mergerstat along with M&A Monitor.

3) Thomson publishes quarterly Releases per region which can be freely accessed via:
http://www.thomson.com/financial/investbank/fi_investbank_league_table.jsp

4) Bloomberg does it if you have its terminal. Can't think of anything that is free or gratis.

5) Adrian Easterbrook from Factset / Mergerstat wrote to me with a free sample and details on the manipulability of the data his company aggregates.

6) M&A Monitor is a newish competitor in the field: http://www.m-a-monitor.co.uk/index.html

7) There's a Bureau van Dijk product called Zephyr (it was once free, but alas! no more...) http://www.bvdep.com/pdf/brochures/ZEPHYR.pdf

8) Dealogic (formerly Computasoft) had a product long ago called Amdata (sorely missed), but they sold the content to Thomson. They started up a new competitor product called m&adata http://www.dealogic.com/index_f.html