I hope all is well with all of you. I am sending this email to you to provide you with some important updates regarding the FIN 321 course. These updates pertain to your term project. The first update is a friendly reminder to not email the SDSU administrator regarding the username and password needed to access the Wharton Data Research Services (WRDS) database for which a class account has already been created.

username: f321sp22 (these are all lowercase)
password: MAECOSPR2022 (all are upper case)

Steps to collect the Fama French Data

Once you log into the WRDS site using the username and password given above and the website provided in the guidelines for the project given on Canvas, please follow the steps below to collect the data:

Step 1: Go to “Get Data”
Step 2: Go to “Data Dashboard”
Step 3: Go to “Third Party”
Step 3: Go to “Fama French Portfolios and Factors”
Step 4: Click on “Factors-Monthly Frequency”
Step 5: Under “Step 1: Choose your date range.” Change the cell on the left to “1980-01”. To do this just click on the cell and then keep hitting the left arrow until you get to 1980 and then click on the box that says “Jan”. Repeat these same steps for the box on the right to get to “2017-12”.
Step 6: Under “Step 2: Choose factors for query” and select all circles except momentum. Please also click on the question mark to see the explanation of each variable as it may aid you in providing a brief explanation/interpretation for each variable.
Step 7: Under “Step 3: Select Query Output”, please select “Excel spreadsheet (*.xlsx)” and “None” under compression type and select a date format of your choosing.
Step 8: Click on the blue box “Submit Query”

Once the output is complete a link to an excel spreadsheet will become available. Once you click on this link, it should open up a spreadsheet containing monthly data containing the Fama French factors.

Steps for obtaining company data

For the WRDS site, you would need the ticker symbol for your company and then you would:

1. Go to Get Data
2. Go to CRSP
3. Stock/Security file
4. Go to Monthly stock file
5: Under “Step 1: Choose your date range.” Change the cell on the left to “1980-01”. To do this just click on the cell and then keep hitting the left arrow until you get to 1980 and then click on the box that says “Jan”. Repeat these same steps for the box on the right to get to “2017-12”.
6. Here you need to enter in your ticker symbol (which you can find through a google search, but please let me know if you require any assistance).
7. Under time series information, please only select PRC (which is the price variable)
8: Under “Step 3: Select Query Output”, please select “Excel spreadsheet (*.xlsx)” and “None” under compression type and select a date format of your choosing.
9: Click on the blue box “Submit Query”