We had another example of how to put Calcbench to use land in our email box the other day, when a subscriber asked us for help in finding firms that recently emerged from bankruptcy.

It didn’t take long for us to point that subscriber in the right direction. Let’s walk through those steps again here, so everyone else can see how you might use Calcbench search techniques for similar needs you might have.

Start on our Interactive Disclosures page, and as always, select the group of companies you want to research. In this instance, we decided to search all firms (the “whole universe” option you see at the top of the page) for 2019.

Then in the full-text search field on the right side of the page, we entered "bankruptcy emerge”~10. (Quotes around “bankruptcy emerge,” tilde mark and 10 on the outside of it.) That tells our databases to search for any instances of the words “bankruptcy” and “emerge” appearing within 10 words of each other. See Figure 1, below.

This method isn’t perfect. You may find several false positives, where the words “bankruptcy” and “emerge” do appear in close proximity, but the disclosure isn’t about a firm emerging from bankruptcy.

That said, this method does provide the raw material that you can keep narrowing until you find examples of what you are looking for. For example, one of the first results in Figure 1 is Pacific Drilling ($PACD), where the relevant disclosures very much were about the firm coming out of bankruptcy the prior year.

That ends today’s lesson in how to Calcbench. No matter what you’re looking for, we’ve got the data in there somewhere!