investment Finance company analysis help

Company profile and industry analysis

Company profile (1 page per company)

Each group should submit a document of about 3 pages consisting with company profile for each of the three companies for the group.

General description of the company, when was it incorporated, shareholders, any news about CEO or board of directors.
Products (describe sales domestically and abroad if relevant).
Main competitors.
Other information about the company, news and factors that may impact performance, main threats and opportunities for the future.
Did the company issue dividends (you are better off if you chose a company with dividends), what do we know about the capital structure?

Data sources

1) Industry and economy-level historical data:

Famous professor Aswath Damodaran (http://damodaran.com) collected an unbelievably rich set of data on his website: http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/data.html Even more importantly, you can find there various industry averages of betas, debt ratios (very useful when looking for divisional cost of capital estimates), industry-level descriptions of capital structure and dividend policies, etc.

Other interesting links from Damodaran’s website:

http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/eqdata.htm

(finance data sources link page – note that some of the services require expensive subscriptions)

http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/spreadsh.htm

(you definitely DO NOT need to use any of the Corporate Finance spreadsheets on this page to solve your project correctly. Still, you may find some of the spreadsheets useful – if not for this project, then maybe for your future assignments and career)

U.S. Treasuries: http://www.ustreas.gov/offices/domestic-finance/debt-management/interest-rate/yield.shtml

2) Information describing your company:

Financial statements, company info, SEC filings:

Yahoo Finance: http://finance.yahoo.com/

MSN Money: http://money.msn.com/investing (or any other public finance website, Google Finance…)

Good sources for betas:

Value Line: http://valueline.com

Corporate Bond Yields to Maturity:

FINRA:

http://www.finra.org/Investors/MarketData/

Bond ratings:

http://www.standardandpoors.com

The site requires free registration.

http://www.moodys.com/

Also requires free registration