The U.S. government began standardizing and regulating financial reporting in 1929 when the stock market crash made it painfully clear that businesses often made absurd claims and that investors were either gullible, unable to verify information, or both. Now, financial reports are used by a company's management to measure profitability (or lack of it), optimize operations and guide the company, by banks and other lenders to gauge the company's financial health, and by institutional or individual investors interested in purchasing stock.
Unless you're financially savvy, annual reports with all those figures, frustrating footnotes, and fine print are boring and intimidating. However, once you have a fundamental knowledge of finance and its basic terminology, you can find the juicy parts. Reading Financial Reports For Dummies by Lita Epstein, a teacher of online financial courses and author of Trading for Dummies, gets you up to speed so you can:
Go past the prose that can maximize the positive and minimize the negative and get information in dollars and cents
Get an overview from the big three--the balance sheet, income statement, and statement of cash flows
Understand the lingo and read between the lines
Calculate basics like PE, Dividend Payout Ratio, ROS, ROA, ROE, Operating Margin, and Net Margin
It pays for investors to be somewhat skeptical instead of gullible. Pressured to please Wall Street, companies are sometimes tempted to use "creative" accounting. You'll discover how to:
Detect red flags (that, unfortunately, aren't emphasized in red) such as lawsuits, changes in accounting methods, and obligations to retirees and future retirees
Understand the different reporting requirements for public companies and private companies with various types of business structures
Analyze a company's cash flow, a prime indicator of its financial health
Scrutinize deals such as mergers, acquisitions, liquidations and other major changes in key assets
Organized so you can start where you're comfortable and proceed at your own pace, Reading Financial Reports for Dummies helps managers prepare annual reports and use financial reporting to budget more efficiently and helps investors base their decisions on knowledge instead of hype. Whether you're in business or in the stock market, knowledge is always an asset.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 5.0 / 5.0
Reading Financial Reports for Dummies:
Some prior knowledge of accounting is required. Written very well. Contents presented in a easy to understand format. Well done.
The best foundation:
So i'm just starting to get into the investing world and after reading books on the top guys like Warren Buffet and George Soros I wanted to read something that would help me grasp financial statements so I could learn if business are being profitable and make educated decisions instead of betting on the market. This helped me ALOT. I gives great examples of not just the information on a financial report but also gives you a behind the scene's look at how the numbers can be affected by different business... more info
If you had to read only one investment book, this one should be it!:
This is the single best book for beginner and intermediate-skilled investors. I believe most non-professional investors will find this an absolute gem. The writing is clear and actually fun to read. You will learn the basics of how to evaluate companies, but Epstein includes nuances that even more advanced investors will find useful. The book is valuable because of its appropriate coverage of 4 separate areas:
1) Teaches the reader basic accounting. For example, what do different items on a cash... more info
Great Book:
Great book, makes it very EASY to understand formulas. Not like most textbooks where there is pages of useless information. Recomend to anyone taking corporate finance or financial analysis.
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