Students examine areas of concern for financial managers: the financial analysis of the firm, including ratio
analysis and fixed and variable cost analysis. For this project, the goal is to gather data about any publicly
traded company in order to determine how the company has performed over time and gather conclusions on
how the company might perform in the future.
The company can be the company you work for (if the company is publicly traded). I’d suggest this option if it is
available to you. The key is to learn how to gather financial information, interpret it, and derive conclusions
based on the information that is available to you as an external party for either investment or analysis
purposes.
Gather three years’ worth of annual report (10-K) Financial information (Balance Sheet/Income Statement only)
from the SEC’s website (Links to an external site.) on any publicly traded company of your choice.
Perform general research on the chosen company about the company, i.e., Headquarter location, nature of
business (SIC Code is helpful here too), historical information about the company and key competitors.
Take the financial information and copy and paste the tables from the annual reports into Microsoft Excel.
Depending on the format of the company’s financial tables, this may be more difficult than others. If you copy
and paste values only there shouldn’t be a problem.
Sample Solution