How do I find the mappings between sedol and isin codes?
There is a relatively straightforward transformation explained on the Wikipedia page here and on the links from that page.  Note that this only applies to SEDOLs for instruments listed on the London Stock Exchange (LSE). To convert SEDOL to ISIN you pad leading zeroes onto the SEDOL until you have 9 digits.  Then you add the two letter country code (as defined in ISO 3166-1) to the front.  Then you add a final checksum digit to the end, again as defined in the algorithm on the Wikipedia page. To convert ISIN to SEDOL you do the reverse: remove the final digit, remove the two leading letters, and strip off any leading zeroes. Example: You can get this information through Bloomberg, but it's a paid service.
I can't speak to Schweser as I've never heard of it but CFAL1 does exactly what you're looking for.  The study prep I recommended has a guy that does a video overview for each topic and he's quite good My understanding is that the CRSP database is used in conjunction with Capital IQ.  All the financial information you need will be in the Capital IQ database.  As far as filtering, all you need to do is set up a series of IF statements. I am not familiar with the database so I cant help you, but you should have ample resources at your university to help you as the filters you are trying to do are pretty straight forward. Good god it's that expensive for CapIQ? Its pretty lame, I have to use it at work (large val shop), but its hit and miss. Have you tried Compustat or Factset? I've worked with both in the past, they seem cheaper and either may provide more reasonable pricing. "Gotcha, so for that job, I would try and get a basic understanding of how pulling queries and tables works.  (ie What does that even mean?  And if you have multiple tables how would you get the information you want?  That's really going to be the important part.   But a lot of times it really depends on the quality of the data, something possibly only IT knows.)  Do you know any basic programming?  A lot of it is just understanding what kind of questions you need to be asking, googling it, then understanding how to incorporate the google answer into your software.  On a side note, the Hyperion, Oracle Essbase, and Access will all be a little different coding wise.  Hyperion you may not really even need to do any ""coding.""  I'd also probably look up what Hyperion Financial Planning is and get familiar with the interface.  It's not hard, just weird if you've only ever used excel (and much more stringent)." You can find both here: http://www.bde.es/tipos/tipose.htm "&gt; I'm not aware of anyone making a screening tool that can integrate all of these things simultaneously. What is the best environment to create a tool like this?  Everyone has one but they're all proprietary. Most common new stuff I've seen in the HF space are C# or Python. R is growing significantly in the space, but it lends itself to one-off data analysis better than writing large applications that have to do a lot of other ""stuff"", where Python's module universe is more exhaustive.  Everyone is going to recommend whatever languages *they* are comfortable with, but the correct answer is probably whatever *you* are most comfortable with." Open, high, low, close, volume. The hint is that volume on new years day is 0.  DC's comment is actually a better answer than mine - when given any data set, you should really know the meaning of each cell/number. Think of it this way: C + (-P) = forward contract. Work it out from there. Anyways, this stack is meant for professionals, not students, I think. Through talking with the head of our finance department yesterday and a few BI guys, i think i'm gonna learn SQL and Python so I can then move on to something like Tableau with a strong base.   The company will pay for my training of it so I'm lucky with that. Do you have any specific ways you recommend I learn SQL/Python?   I know of CodeAcademy but haven't done too much other research. Some additional links which explain their differences. But mostly as @bstpierre says, both are very similar and in some cases the terms may be used inter changeably It's difficult when you read every few sentences and a new phrase pops out. I'm not procrastinating here, I feel getting an overview of it here while I can ask specific questions about terms I don't understand will help me more than just reading it on my own. At least that's what I've found. I'm not smart and I learn better this way. What would an entry level job entail?  I know a fair amount of scientific computing (numerical methods, finite element methods), but computer science knowledge/skills are like intro to comp sci I and maybe II.  You don't need a lot of comp sci stuff to implement scientific algorithms in matlab (e.g. not even, like, object-based programming, classes, or even recursion, although I've touched on these things in intro comp sci classes), so Idk if you're thinking I have more skills than I do. The closest I can think of from the back of my head is http://finviz.com/map.ashx, which display a nice map and allows for different intervals. It has different scopes (S&P500, ETFs, World), but does not allow for specific date ranges, though. It appears that hashes starting with 00000 are password already 'reversed' (I don't know the correct word for it).  So if you want to test if your password is in the file, you'll have to look for your original hash and 00000restofyouroriginalhash  Example for 'linkedin':  * 7728240c80b6bfd450849405e8500d6d207783b6 is not present * 0000040c80b6bfd450849405e8500d6d207783b6 is present  Python script to do it quickly if you are interested :      from hashlib import sha1     def check_pass(plaintext, offset=5):         hashed = sha1(plaintext).hexdigest()         return (hashed, '0' * offset + hashed[offset:]) If you just need to fill out the basic forms. this post is really helpful and translates them to english as well as telling you which forms to fill out. http://www.toytowngermany.com/wiki/ELSTER . it really helped me out the last couple years. this year is of course tricky as i did some consulting back in the US and have to figure out the AUS form vs N AUS or what the deal is.  hope it helps