June 2008
Beginner
402 pages
11h 4m
English
Content preview from Accounting For Dummies®, 4th Edition
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17.2. Decide What to Read
Suppose you own stock shares in a public corporation and want to keep informed about its performance. You could depend on articles and news items in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Barron's, and so on that summarize the latest financial reports of the company. This saves you the time and trouble of reading the reports yourself. Generally, these brief articles capture the most important points. If you own an investment portfolio of many different stocks, reading news articles that summarize the financial reports of the companies is not a bad approach. But suppose you want more financial information than you can get in news articles?
The annual financial reports of public companies contain lots of information: a letter from the chief executive, a highlights section, trend charts, financial statements, extensive footnotes to the financial statements, historical summaries, and a lot of propaganda. And you get photos of the top brass and directors, of course. (The financial reports of most private companies are significantly smaller; they contain financial statements with footnotes, and not much more.)
So, how much of the report do you actually read?
You could read just the highlights section and let it go at that. This might do in a pinch. I think you should read the chief executive's letter to shareowners as well. Ideally, the letter summarizes in an evenhanded and appropriately modest manner the main developments during the year. However, these ...
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.