June 2004
Beginner
504 pages
15h 36m
English
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Compare Year-to-Year Results
Buy-and-hold investing doesn’t mean buy-and-forget. Compare a company’s performance to the same period a year ago to look for signs of trouble with its fundamentals.
For long-term investors, comparing shorter-term financial results can raise red flags about a company’s current condition. By comparing recent annual or quarterly results to the same period a year ago, you might receive early warning of a problem that could turn into a full-blown disaster over time. There is a wide range of figures you should evaluate on a company’s income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statement.
The formula for calculating percentage change is shown in Example 4-49.
Example 4-49. Formula for percentage change
Percentage change = ((Ending Value / Initial Value) - 1) * 100
Tip
Companies usually highlight changes in key figures in their quarterly and annual earnings releases. The financial tables that accompany these press releases include data for the most recent and comparable year-ago periods.
A good source of SEC filing data for public companies is Price Waterhouse Coopers Global’s EdgarScan [Hack #18] (http://edgarscan.pwcglobal.com). Here you can download a single spreadsheet that has a company’s annual and quarterly data going back ten years.
After you’ve downloaded the spreadsheet for a company, isolate any two columns (either for two years or two quarters) and calculate the percentage change in a third column. Copy the formula down the column, and you’ll be ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
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.