Efficient Ideas: Building custom groupings in Portfolio Analysis

If you'd like to leverage proprietary data or formulas in a Portfolio Analysis grouping, setting up the group is not difficult. The benefit of creating custom groups is broad: you can group securities according to their associated analyst or use a firm-specific definition of performance to place securities or sectors into "buckets." FactSet presents many ways for you to view the data, and does not limit you to just what you see as the default options. The custom grouping feature is one additional way that we make your portfolio analysis more flexible.

You can create a custom grouping according to a formula or according to a proprietary column of data in your uploaded portfolios. We'll focus on the second option today.

Create a custom grouping in four steps:

1. Determine what column in your portfolio may be used for your group. This may be a column that defines the analyst, the analyst's rating, or in-house defined numbers for market value. Open your spreadsheet to see the column in question, or do this by opening Data Central.
2. Go to Portfolio Analysis from the FactSet Insert Menu by clicking the F icon > Portfolio > Portfolio Analysis.
3. Choose the Options button, then the Groupings tab, and click the New button.
4. Create a custom code and insert it into the dialog box, using your portfolio name, column name, and date code. For instance, if you have an OFDB portfolio called Special.OFDB in your Client folder, enter in OFDB(CLIENT:SPECIAL, ANALYST, #SD).

Note: Date variables can be found in greater detail on Online Assistant page8832. SD means from the start day.