Factset refresh takes too long
There is absolutely NO technical explanation as to why refreshing the market data in my workbook should take 60+ minutes. The formulas are simple and the data is just limited to a bunch of numbers. Meanwhile, we can livestream 4K movies and run insanely more complex calculations on an AWS server that's probably 10x cheaper than the Factset licence my bank is paying.
Factset has NO excuse and I'm tired of that time-wasting piece of shit bitchass software that forces me to stay late at night just waiting for it to fucking finish refreshing.
Turns out Factset is publicly listed, wouldn't Thoma Bravo or Vista be interested in doing a take private on these motherfuckers and getting us a product that actually fucking works? So sick and tired of that piece of crap
Google volatile functions dude it’s not factset
I’ve never used Factset. Are you pulling data with a connector? APIs are rate limited. If you’re talking about data not being updated, a lot of companies have batch data infrastructure still. It’s expensive/complex to stream in a lot of cases.
That is frustrating though. I feel your pain. If I had to guess they are just running an hourly spark job to pull data from wherever they get it, and you’re at the mercy of that timeline
APIs aren't rate limited. They're hard count limited. BBG has a monthly limit, and Morningstar direct is daily (100k datapoints/day--Sad that I have that memorized, but it's a long story) I forget what Factset is offhand, since I've used it less (Mostly PA2/PA3) but Factset is also notoriously slow for everybody. I've always suspected that it's related to the customization. PA is much more flexible than PORT.
OP: As others have noted, hardcoding static data is your friend. Planning and running ahead of time if you can is also helpful.
60+ minutes? How many cells are you refreshing..? If it’s a large amount just do it once and hard code everything except the last rows so you can drag the formulas down
any historical data you want to hardcode.
How many cells are you refreshing? The largest file I've ever seen takes 15-20 min to factset refresh and it's thousands and thousands of cells (data dump file of every possible comp and metric)
Unless you're refreshing a comps set with every public company in the world this should never take 60 minutes. IMO slow internet / computer, or you should try refreshing by worksheet, or do selection and only refresh the new data - workbook is always inexplicably 100x slower than refreshing sheet or selection
I’ve used both factset and cap iq and the latter is way faster. Longest I’ve seen is like 5 mins for cap iq for a fat NTM EBITDA over time backup.
Good thing about long FS refreshes though is you can use it as an excuse to take a break
Make sure you’re using array formulas and not per cell. Like if you’re pulling EV daily for 3 years, put a start and end date cell at the top and use those when making the FS formula in the sidebar. Speeds things up considerably.
This is absolutely true. I had a backup that was taking at least 20 minutes on each refresh, and doing this brought it to under a minute
Can you explain this more? You’re saying reference the date? So if A1 is EV start date you would do A1+1 to get the second date EV?
So basically put start date in cell A1 (for these daily pulls, present day / most recent date is considered the start). Ex: 1/1/23
Then put end date in cell A2 (so if 3 years of data do 1/1/20).
Then in the FS sidebar instead of just linking to a date column on the left, use the start and end date cells and make them absolute references.
If done correctly, the “array” of data will populate as one contiguous column and have a single purple outline around it when you hover over with your mouse.
If that wasn’t clear enough - recommend just calling FS support.
The solution is to move to a firm that uses CapIQ.
Source: I did this, comps files now refresh in 5 seconds.
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