Exploring the 
LSEG Workspace 
Corporate Actions Content Set

Introduction

Corporate actions are among the most common sources of data discontinuity in financial time series. A stock split, a dividend, or a merger can introduce breaks in price history that - if left unaddressed - propagate errors through every downstream calculation: returns, volatility, signals, and portfolio valuations.

This guide covers the full lifecycle of working with corporate actions using the LSEG Data Library for Python: from understanding what corporate actions are, to fetching events, applying adjustments, and safeguarding your pipelines against identifier changes.

Prerequisites:

• Python 3.8+
• LSEG Workspace (desktop) or valid Platform credentials
• lseg-data library installed

Table of Contents

Theory:

• 01 - What Are Corporate Actions?
• 02 - Types of Corporate Actions
• 03 - Key Dates
• 04 - Price Adjustments

Practical:

• 05 - Environment Setup
• 06 - Fetching Capital Change Events
• 07 Adjusted vs. Unadjusted Prices
• 08. Detecting Price Discontinuities
• 09 - Dividends
  • 9.1 - Dividend Pattern Visualization
  • 9.2 - Annualised Dividend
• 10. Using Field-Level Parameters
• 11. Applying Adjustment Factors Manually
• 12. Handling RIC Changes with PermIDs
• 13. Broader Corporate Events (TR.EventType)
• 14. Event Metadata: Status, IDs, and Forward-Looking Events
  • 14.1 Event Status (Confirmed vs Estimated)         
  • 14.2 Event ID      
  • 14.3 Rescinded Events  
  • 14.4 Dividend Currency
• 15 - Summary & Resources
  • Key Takeaways
  • ISO 15022/20022 Corporate Action Codes (SWIFT)

01 - What Are Corporate Actions?

A corporate action is any event initiated by a company that materially changes its shareholders' position, its outstanding securities, or its capital structure. 'Material' here means measurable: share count, price per share, capital structure, or the investor's relationship with the company.

Why developers need to care:

Corporate actions break raw price series. Consider a stock trading at $800 on Tuesday that opens at $200 on Wednesday. In unadjusted data, this appears as a 75% decline. In reality, it was a 4-for-1 stock split - total market capitalisation unchanged, share count quadrupled, price quartered.

The challenge: unadjusted price data does not raise errors or warnings. It returns numbers that are systematically incorrect for any calculation that spans across a corporate action date. Most financial data bugs - incorrect returns, inflated volatility, false signals - trace back to corporate actions not being accounted for.

Corporate actions are classified as either mandatory (automatic, no shareholder action required) or voluntary (requires shareholder election to participate).

02 - Types of Corporate Actions

2.1 Mandatory Corporate Actions
These events affect all shareholders automatically - no action or election is required. The common ones are:

2.2 Voluntary Corporate Actions
These require shareholders to actively choose whether to participate. Non-participation is the default outcome. The common ones are:

03 - Key Dates

Every corporate action revolves around a set of critical dates that determine eligibility, price adjustment timing, and settlement. These apply across global markets.

Timeline example (Cash Dividend):

Declaration ──── Ex-Date ──── Record Date ──── Payment Date

   Apr 18                     May 30                  May 30                        Jun 30

Note: The relationship between ex-date and record date varies by market. In most markets, ex-date precedes record date by the settlement cycle (T+1 or T+2).

04 - Price Adjustments

The effect of Corporate Action event creates gap in current market price and historical market prices of the share and it misleads investors choice of buying/selling if not filled the gap. Adjustment factor is calculated and applied to fill the gap appropriately. Historical prices must be adjusted backwards.

How it works:

A stock trading at 800 undergoes a 4-for-1 split. Post-split price: 200. To create a continuous, comparable series, all historical prices before the split are divided by the split ratio (4). The 800 becomes 200 in the adjusted series.

Adjustment Factor:

LSEG provides an Adjustment Factor - a multiplier that can be applied backward through price history. This allows you to:

• Convert unadjusted prices to adjusted prices: Adjusted Price = Unadjusted Price × Adjustment Factor
• Maintain correct return calculations across event dates
• Preserve data integrity in automated pipelines

The adjustment factors should be applied on Price Only or Pricing data (Price and Volume) & Per Share data (Dividends, Earnings, Shares). Adjustment type is also provided which indicate the factors should be adjusted on components for each event type. The adjustment types are

• Capital Change (CCH) - This adjustment type indicates the adjustment factor should be applied on Pricing data (Price and Volume) & Per Share data (Dividends, Earnings, Shares). This event type is predominantly used where the shares outstanding value changes due to corporate action event. For example- Stock splits, consolidations, Rights issue (same stock), Priority Issue (same stock), Bonus Issue (Same stock) and Stock Dividend (Same stock)
• Reuters Pricing Only (RPO) - This adjustment type indicates the adjustment factor should be applied on Pricing only. This type is predominantly used where there would not be change in the existing number of outstanding shares due to corporate action event. For example, Demergers, Rights issue (different stock), Priority Issue (different stock), Bonus Issue (different stock) and Stock Dividend (different stock), capital returns and so on.

Note: Refer section 11 for practical demo. 

Default behaviour: LSEG delivers adjusted prices by default. You do not need to do anything extra to get a clean, split-adjusted series. To retrieve raw unadjusted prices, you must explicitly pass Adjusted=0 as a field-level parameter. 

Both views have valid use cases:

Adjusted (default): Continuous series for return calculations, backtesting, technical analysis

Unadjusted (Adjusted=0): Actual traded prices, identifying corporate action dates visually, regulatory reporting

05 - Environment Setup

Tip: To identify the correct field names for any LSEG content set, use the Data Item Browser (DIB) available in Workspace. Filter by Corporate Action under content classification to browse all available fields, their descriptions, and supported parameters.

06 - Fetching Capital Change Events

Capital change events are corporate actions that directly affect shares - quantity, face value, or price. These include stock splits, bonus issues, and reverse splits.

The field TR.CACorpActEventType returns capital change events specifically. Below, we retrieve the complete split history for Apple (AAPL.O).

The CAEventType parameter accepts semicolon-separated codes to filter by event type. 

The full list of valid codes is available in the Data Item Browser (DIB) in the parameters section for the CAEventType field. Always verify codes against DIB, as they may vary by coverage.

You can pass multiple codes (e.g., 'SSP;SIS') or omit the parameter to retrieve all capital change events.

07 Adjusted vs. Unadjusted Prices

LSEG delivers adjusted prices by default - corporate actions are already accounted for. To retrieve raw (unadjusted) prices, pass Adjusted=0 as a field-level parameter. Below, we fetch both views for Apple to see the difference.

Observations:

• The unadjusted chart shows sudden price drops at each split date. These are not crashes - they are the raw traded prices before and after each corporate action. This view is useful for identifying when events occurred and analysing post-event price recovery.
• The adjusted chart rewrites history so that the entire series is comparable on a single scale. This is the correct input for return calculations, moving averages, and backtesting.

Important: TR. Fields vs. Real-Time Pricing Fields

There are two different adjustment mechanisms depending on the type of field you use. This is a common source of confusion.

For real-time pricing fields, the adjustments parameter accepts a list of correction types:

08. Detecting Price Discontinuities

A practical use case:
programmatically detecting large overnight price moves in unadjusted data that likely correspond to corporate actions rather than genuine market moves.

These detected dates should align with the split events retrieved in Section 6. This technique is useful for data quality checks - if discontinuities appear that do not correspond to known corporate actions, they may indicate data errors.

09 - Dividends

Dividend data includes announcement dates, ex-dates, payment dates, amounts, types (interim, final, special), and payment forms (cash, stock). Below, we retrieve the full dividend history for Infosys (INFY.NS).

9.1 - Dividend Pattern Visualization

A bubble chart showing dividend payments by month and year reveals the company's distribution pattern. Bubble size represents the dividend amount; colour indicates the dividend type.

9.2 - Annualised Dividend

To compare companies better & calculate yields, dividend periods need to be standardized. This is where annualized dividend becomes useful. LSEG provides annualized dividends, calculated using the following four methodologies:

💡TIP: 

Instead of retrieving multiple fields and calculating metrics separately, you can embed calculations directly within your API query. This approach makes your requests more efficient and keeps your logic centralized.

10. Using Field-Level Parameters

The LSEG Data Library supports inline parameters on individual fields. This allows a single generic field to serve multiple purposes depending on the parameter passed - reducing the number of distinct field names you need to remember.

For example, TR.DivDate with the DateType parameter can return different dates:

• DateType=PD → Payment Date
• DateType=RD → Record Date
• DateType=ED → Ex-Date
• DateType=AD → Announcement Date

💡TIP:

Each field listed in the Data Item Browser (DIB) shows its supported parameters. Field-level parameters (applied inline) override global parameters (applied in the parameters dict).

11. Applying Adjustment Factors Manually

Section 7 showed that LSEG delivers adjusted prices by default. Some workflows require storing unadjusted prices - for audit trails, regulatory reporting, or exchange settlement matching - and computing the adjusted series on demand.

LSEG provides two fields for adjustment factors:

Use TR.CAAdjustmentFactor when you need the full event history.

How factors work:

Each factor is event-specific and is applied backward - to prices before the corporate action date. Prices after the event are already at the post-event level and need no modification.

Different historical periods need different adjustments, depending on how many events occurred after that date:

Formula: Adjusted Price = Unadjusted Price × (product of factors for all events after that date)

Diagram:

Why 0.25 and not 1/224? The factor 1/224 accounts for all five AAPL splits combined (2×2×2×7×4). It only applies to prices from before 1987. Prices from 2020 only have one split "ahead" of them (the 4-for-1), so the correct factor is 0.25. Always use the factor that matches how many splits are after your price date.

12. Handling RIC Changes with PermIDs

Certain corporate actions - name changes, mergers, de-mergers, spin-offs - can result in RIC (Reuters Instrument Code) changes. A workflow hardcoded to a specific RIC will break when this happens.

PermIDs (Permanent Identifiers) provide a stable reference that persists across RIC changes. They are assigned to organisations, instruments, and individuals, and do not change regardless of corporate events.

Example: Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook)

When Facebook rebranded to Meta in 2021, the RIC changed from FB.OQ to META.OQ. Any pipeline referencing FB.OQ would stop receiving data.

Best Practice:

PermID-Based Pipelines

For production workflows, store the Organisation PermID as your primary key rather than the RIC. If there are multiple venues or forms, then using RIC is ideal. 

13. Broader Corporate Events (TR.EventType)

The TR.CACorpActEventType field used above covers capital change events specifically - splits, bonus issues, and similar. But companies generate a much wider range of announcements: earnings releases, shareholder meetings, executive changes, M&A activity, and more.

For this broader scope, use the TR.EventType family of fields with the EventType parameter.

The EventType parameter accepts:

• ALL - all event types
• Specific types like CV for company visits, or RES for earings release etc. 

This is useful when building event calendars, screening for upcoming catalysts, or monitoring corporate activity across a watchlist.

💡TIP:

When querying events for large universes (e.g., all ASX-listed companies), batch your requests into chunks to avoid timeouts:

14. Event Metadata: Status, IDs, and Forward-Looking Events

14.1 Event Status (Confirmed vs Estimated)

Corporate action dates can be confirmed (company-announced) or estimated. The field TR.EventStatus indicates this:

This matters for forward-looking workflows - estimated dates shift frequently and should be treated as provisional.

14.2 Event ID

Each corporate action has a unique identifier (TR.EventEventID). Use it to:

- Deduplicate events when polling for updates

- Track lifecycle changes (announced → confirmed → completed → rescinded)

- Link related records across separate API calls

14.3 Rescinded Events

A corporate action can be announced and later cancelled. The field TR.CAIsRescinded returns True for withdrawn events. Always filter these out before applying adjustments - a rescinded split never took effect.

Important: Do not combine forward-looking and historical date ranges in the same request. The API behaves differently for estimated future events vs. confirmed past events. Query them separately.

14.4 Dividend Currency

For cross-border portfolios, the dividend currency matters for tax and FX conversion. The field TR.DivOriginalCurr returns the ISO currency code of the dividend payment. The difference between TR.DivAdjustedGross and TR.DivAdjustedNet represents withholding tax - relevant for international holdings.

15 - Summary & Resources

Key Takeaways

If you have questions, find an issue, or want to suggest improvements:

- Post on the Developer Community Q&A

- Contact your LSEG representative for access and licensing queries

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