SDC Platinum: M&A and new-issues deal data (licensed)

Licensed: not exercised here

SDC Platinum is a paid licensed product (LSEG / Refinitiv), so it carries no provenance badge: the access path below was not run in this session (no Refinitiv / SDC credentials were available). The page documents the access route and the gotchas; treat it as unverified until someone exercises it through a licensed account. This is the honest grade under the institute’s Verified discipline.

SDC Platinum (Securities Data Company) is the long-standing deal-level database used across corporate finance: mergers and acquisitions (the M&A database) and new issues (the Global New Issues database: IPOs, seasoned equity offerings, and debt issuance), with deal terms, dates, parties, advisers, and deal values. It is the standard source for M&A and issuance samples. Papers we distill use it for deal samples, for example Guenzel on sunk-cost effects in acquisitions and Cookson, Niessner & Schiller on merger withdrawals.

• Cost: licensed, subscription. No free tier.
• Vendor: LSEG / Refinitiv (formerly Thomson Reuters / Thomson Financial; the product traces back to Securities Data Company).
• Coverage: global M&A from the 1980s and new security issues, deal-level, with target/acquirer identifiers, deal status and dates, consideration, and league-table fields. Newer access is migrating into Refinitiv Workspace (Deals), with the legacy SDC Platinum desktop being retired.

Access (when licensed)

• Refinitiv / LSEG, not WRDS. Unlike CRSP, Compustat, and I/B/E/S, SDC is usually reached through the Refinitiv terminal (legacy SDC Platinum desktop or the newer Refinitiv Workspace “Deals” application), not through WRDS. Check whether your institution licenses it separately from its WRDS subscription.
• Custom reports. Data is pulled by building a query (deal type, date range, nation, status) and exporting a custom report; there is no single canonical table. Save the request definition so the extract is reproducible.
• Credentials and a terminal seat are required. Keep any credentials in .env, never hard-coded.

Gotchas (the ones that bite pipelines)

These are the failure modes to expect; they are documented, not verified here.

• The sample is the query, so the query is the method. Because every extract is defined by a point-and-click request (deal flags, date window, nation, public/private status, minimum deal value), two researchers asking “the same” question can get different samples. Record the exact request definition and every filter; the extract is not reproducible without it.
• Deal value is missing for a large share of deals. Many transactions, especially private and small deals, have no disclosed value. Filtering on deal value silently selects toward large, public, US deals; treat a value-conditioned sample as non-random.
• Coverage and flags change over time and get backfilled. SDC has revised historical records and added deals retroactively, and definitions of fields (deal attitude, completion status, percent sought/acquired) are not uniform across the full history. Pin the extraction date and do not assume a field means the same thing across decades.
• Status and double-counting need care. A single transaction can appear as multiple records (amended terms, competing bids, tranches), and the completed/withdrawn/pending status drives the sample. Define inclusion on status explicitly and de-duplicate on the deal identifier, not on target-acquirer-date alone.
• Documented data-quality errors. The reliability of SDC M&A fields has been questioned in the accounting and finance literature; do not treat individual flags as ground truth. Cross-check material deals against filings (SEC EDGAR) or news when the deal drives the result.
• Identifiers need linking to returns data. Target and acquirer are keyed by SDC’s own identifiers plus CUSIP/ticker; join to CRSP via CUSIP with the usual historical-CUSIP caveats rather than assuming a clean permno match.

Reference: the two main databases

Database	What it holds
M&A	Deal-level mergers, acquisitions, tender offers, buybacks, stake purchases
Global New Issues	IPOs, seasoned equity offerings, and debt issuance (terms, dates, underwriters)

Each is queried by deal type, date range, nation, and status into a custom exported report; field availability differs between the two.

Citation

Cite the provider and the database, e.g.: SDC Platinum (M&A) / Refinitiv (LSEG), accessed YYYY-MM-DD. State the database (M&A or New Issues), the exact query filters (deal type, dates, nation, status, deal-value cutoff), and the extraction date.