Applying Finance Concepts

This assignment will require you to continue your research of the company(s) you chose for Discussions 4, 6, and 7. If you decide to change companies, go to the link for Reserving Your Company to reserve your new company. Be sure to check that no one else has already reserved the company. No response post is required this week. Financial ratios are used to assess a company's strengths and weaknesses. One way to use ratios is to compare the company under consideration to the industry average. Deriving meaning from comparative analysis has become more difficult since many companies have diversified into several different industries. Another way to use ratios, trend analysis, involves looking at the trend of a single company's ratios over time. In this assignment you will use the Standard and Poors NetAdvantage database and Yahoo! Finance to collect and compare company and industry financial data. To find the data for the subject company, go to NetAdvantages Ratios screen which is located under the Financials/Valuation heading. Take care to pull the data from the far-right column in order to get the most recent data. To find the data for the industry, select Tearsheet which is located under the Company Summary heading. From the Tearsheet screen, click on the link under the Primary Industry Classification heading. On the screen that follows, select Key Stats & Ratios which is located under the Industry Profile heading. Take note of the name of the industry as it is listed at the top of the following page. Again, take care to pull the data from the column labeled Latest on the far right side of the screen. Review the text for in order to interpret the data. The goal is to gain some insight into what is behind the companys financial performance. Try to understand what each ratio tells you about the companys financial management practices. Notes Negative numbers are reported in parenthesis and should be reported as such. TTM refers to trailing 12 months Post your report in the format that follows: Name of Company and Ticker Symbol Name of Industry Profitability Ratios (10 points) Net Profit Margin (listed as Net Income Margin % on NetAdvantage) Company _____ (LTM) Industry Avg. _____ (LTM) Return on Assets (listed as Return on Assets % on NetAdvantage) Company _____ (LTM) Industry Avg. _____ (LTM) Return on Equity (listed as Return on Equity % on NetAdvantage) Company _____ (LTM) Industry Avg. _____ (LTM) Stock Price data (finance.yahoo.com Statistics tab) Current Stock Price: $ _________ 52 week high $______; 52 week low $________ S&P500 52-Week Change ______%