vania-janet/multiturn-rag-retrieval-data huggingface dataset:
Good post - just to note to self to add my comments this weekend  A couple thoughts that came to mind (sorry, was working on an idea this weekend):  * When comparing companies, reviewing accounting policies in detail for any substantive differences. A notable example would be telecom companies who expense wireless subsidies vs. capitalizing them - obviously makes a large difference in a EBITDA-based * I always approach a company from a SOTP perspective... hidden assets or otherwise, many businesses have various segments, which if they can be reliably broken off, provide good insight into underlying op performance * If appropriate (i.e. will never be reinvested), tax-adjusting cash balances that are offshore * Cyclical industries, always compare on a mid-cycle basis * Dynamic schedules (i.e. at various prices) for dilutive instruments and proceeds thereof. For most large caps this is not relevant, but for certain industries it is much more popular (e.g. resource, tech)
The value of a share depends on the value of the company, which involves a lot more than the value of its assets -- it requires making decisions about what you think will happen to the company in the future. That's inherently not something that can be reduced to a single formula, at least not unless you can figure out how to represent your guesses and your confidence in them in the formula ... and even if you could do all that it would only say what you think the stock is worth; others will be using different numbers and legitimately get different results. Disagreement over value is what the stock market is all about, I'm afraid.
"I am doing an assignment for a finance class, and I am writing a recommendation for a specific capital structure. One of the concerns brought up by the ""board of directors"" was interest coverage, so in my addressing that topic in my report, I want to compare to competitors. The interest coverage ratio under this capital structure that I'm choosing is 11.8 and the two competitors we are given information on are Company A (who has an interest coverage ratio of 6.67) and Company B (who has an interest coverage ratio of 11.25). It seems good, but my concern is that I may be missing something, as Company A is similar in size (in terms of sales) to the company I am writing a report for while Company B has ~50 times more sales than the company I am writing a report for.   Advice, things to consider as I move forward?"
"Yes, especially if you are a value investor. The importance and relevance of financial statements depends on the company. IMO, the statements of a troubled ""too big to fail"" bank like Citibank or Bank of America are meaningless. In other industries, the statements will help you distinguish the best performers -- if you understand the industry. A great retail example was Bed, Bath and Beyond vs. Linens and Things. Externally, the stores appeared identical -- they carried the same product and even offered the same discounts. Looking at the books would have revealed that Linens and Things carried an enormous amount of debt that fueled rapid growth... debt that killed the company."
"IMO, what it seems like you've done is nothing more than having screened out a company worth further investigation. The next step would be a thorough analysis of the company's past financials and current statements to arrive at your own opinion / forecast of the immediate and far future of the company's prospects.  Typically, this is done by looking at the company's regulatory filings, and maybe some additional searching on comparison businesses.  There are many sources of instruction for how one might ""value"" or ""analyze"" a company, or that provide help on ""reading a balance sheet"".  (This is not an easy skill to learn, but it is one that will prove invaluable over a lifetime of investing.) It is possible that you'll uncover a deteriorating business where the latest selling, and subsequent drop in price that caused the high yield, is well-deserved.  In which case, you know to stay away and move on to the next idea. On the other hand, you might end up confident that the company is not suffering from a drop in sales, rise in expenses, growing debt payments, loss of ""moat"", etc.  In which case, you've found a great investment candidate.  I say candidate because you still may decide this company isn't for you, even if the financials are right, because you might find better opportunities for an equal, or acceptable, return at lower risk while you're researching. As to the yield being high when there are no problems with the fundamentals of the business, this may simply be because of panic selling during this past few week's downturn, or some other sort of temporary and superficial scare.  However, be warned that the masses can remain irrational, and thus the price stay suppressed or even drop further, for longer than you're willing to wait for your ROI.  The good news is that in that case, you're being well compensated to wait at a 11+% yield!"
Problem with deciding investments in a company is that you have multiple potential options, each with their projected returns, but each also has some hard-to-estimate risks. A further problem is that these opportunities arrive one-by-one, so you usually cannot compare project A vs. project B to decide which one is better. The internal rate of return is a rule-of-thumb like way to make these decisions. The company board may set an IRR target of e.g. 15%, and each executive will compare their projects against that target. They'll execute only the projects that are projected to give a good return, but some of these projects will end up failing. Thus the real average profit will not be equal to IRR. Important thing is that this target number gives ways to compare projects, and also for the board to control the investments. If the company has a good track record of being successful at projects, the board might set an IRR target of 10% and expect to get e.g. 8% return on their investment. However, if the company has a much larger risk of projects failing, they might demand a predicted IRR of 20% to account for the risk. Ultimately if the IRR target is set too high, the company will find no projects it considers profitable to invest in. In practice if this happens, the company owners are better off taking out the cash as dividends and investing it elsewhere.
"I highly recommend http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/ Professor Damodaran. He's written some of the best valuation books in existence (my favorite, simply ""Investment Valuation""). On his website you'll find a big pile of spreadsheets, that are models for working the various approaches to valuing a company.  Also, he teaches an MBA-level valuation course at Stern School of Business in NYC. And he videotapes it and you can watch it for free. Very smart, kind, generous man."
Hey Forum,  I recently had an update to the app where it now allows you to find out your markup percentage. All you have to do is put in your desired profit at the end of the month and then put in how many items you want to sell each month and the entire formula is calculated for you in less than a second. Extremely convenient and extremely time-saving.  You can download the Android version here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.markupmagic.companymarkup&amp;hl=en   And the iOS here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/markup-magic-profit-calculator/id1183206273?mt=8   We are currently redoing the website so you can look out for that soon enough. :)  As always, suggestions and comments are always welcome as we want this to be the best app it can be for users.  Take care and have a wonderful time.
Go to bankrate dot com. They will have a lot of metrics there that might give you an idea and rate each category. Capitalization and profitability metrics. May not be as granular as what you are looking for though.
But on average, if a company is good at doing something and they pay out the earnings, you come out ahead. You get in trouble when businesses are good at something, and they take all the money they make and put it into doing something they are not good at. A business might only provide good cashflow for 10-20 years when the product is popular and before competitors cut into margins. If that money is squandered, the long term shareholder may ultimately have very terrible results. The long term shareholder ends up being the guy who keeps going all-in on a 80%-chance-to-win bet (that is what management is doing when they bet the company on the next unproven product), but eventually he gets zeroed out on one loss. This is why if you look at Buffett's investments, they are all in simple businesses that spits off cash to the owner/shareholder. Businesses like soft drinks, snacks, rail roads, vanilla banking, utility-like energy companies, insurance, etc. You might be good at judging the odds of whether a business will succeed or not (aka make more money than your original investment or not). But you don't want management of that company to make a wildly different bet for you. Just because they are great at operating a company doesn't mean they are good enough at judging odds or disciplined enough to make those bets for you. I may have predicted accurately that Business X will be a great success, but if manage takes those profits and goes all in on Business Y, without giving me a chance to cash out, that may have disasterous results."
"Corporate restructuring makes everything a flux, so you might as well revisit some core fundamental questions. Here's how to do this professionally: Start floating your CV now. Line up interviews in competing companies. Attend to them. Score a job offer, and have it put into writing, with exact salary, which should be at least 10%++ of your current one. Take a clear empty page, and write on top: ""Business value provided"". Put down your major contributions, and achievements. Wherever possible, put the company's expected dollar value near to it. For bonus points, sum it up on the bottom, and minus your current salary. Difference is ""Profit provided directly to the company's bottom line"". Float this to your manager's desk. At this position, you have only one fundamental question to your boss: ""match or pass?"" :) A corporate spin-off is a good time to do this: 1, to ensure, that your position will not be made redundant; 2, if it is, you have a backup plan. If the parent company's ""getting rid of you"", however, there are even more fundamental questions you might want to ask yourself: is this really a profitable division, or merely a loss leader? Does this company have a future, and the adequate growing options for you, personally?  To answer these questions, you must have an opportunity cost estimation; and for that, you must have second (and preferably, third) options -hence, the strategy above. To conclude, the best time to do your job research is every other month; and the best time to ask for a raise is always now :) Good luck!"
Obviously, there's some due diligence and quantitative analysis. However, it's mostly just what they can secure, for how much and how quickly. For instance, if you had a bakery that was netting 200,000/yr and needed 750,000 to open a new location. The bank will give you the loan over 10 years at 1.1%. Well, it's probably a good idea to take on debt. That's 6938 a month (I think).  Edit: Or issue debt yourself.  However, let's say you're merging with someone in the same industry. They have a market cap of 10 billion. Your company has a market cap of 62 billion and revenue of 11.8 billion a year. It's probably a good idea to secure with equity. Especially because you believe the merger will help you expand.
Let's take a step back. My fictional company 'A' is a solid, old, established company. It's in consumer staples, so people buy the products in good times and bad. It has a dividend of $1/yr. Only knowing this, you have to decide how much you would be willing to pay for one share.  You might decide that $20 is fair. Why? Because that's a 5% return on your money, 1/20 = 5%, and given the current rates, you're happy for a 5% dividend. But this company doesn't give out all its earnings as a dividend. It really earns $1.50, so the P/E you are willing to pay is 20/1.5 or 13.3.  Many companies offer no dividend, but of course they still might have earnings, and the P/E is one metric that used to judge whether one wishes to buy a stock.  A high P/E implies the buyers think the stock will have future growth, and they are wiling to pay more today to hold it. A low P/E might be a sign the company is solid, but not growing, if such a thing is possible.
Look up the pure-play beta method.  (It also can be called project beta. On mobile or else I would link.)  Essentially, you find a public company that business is the same (or as similar as possible) to the sub-unit business. You take this company's beta, unlever it from their capital structure, and relever it to the capital structure of the whole multinational company.  This new beta can be considered the beta of the sub-unit.
Some of this should be codified in the form of standard operating procedures (SOPs) which can be referenced at any time. Many companies use a ""playbook"" which is a high-level reference guide on how to operate the business (an example is found here: https://www.atlassian.com/team-playbook). A playbook can be anything from a PDF to an interactive website like the aforementioned link. It should always have the most up-to-date information. Most companies will change their structure over time as their environment (both internal and external) change and they need to adapt. For example, a small firm may not need an HR department, but as it employs more and more people, a need to have someone (or an entire team) focused on human capital management rises quickly -- an owner-operator can handle only so much before it is time to scale up. The most important thing to consider is who you hire. People are the largest expense to an organization, and having the right people in the right roles is the best way to avoid unnecessary incremental costs resulting from inefficiency, fraud, or risky behavior. Always look for the personality traits that make a good employee relative to the role (i.e., customer service: friendliness; finance: integrity; operations: teamwork). One of the most obvious parts of a business as it scales up is specialization. You want to find a balance, though. For example, HR handles all human relations issues, while Legal handles all internal claims, suits, and patents. There is an overlap that occurs here, as internal claims often start as human relations issues, which means you must have healthy communication and clear accountability for an appropriate hand-off so Legal takes a claim at the right point in time. While this example may be a little obvious, many times the edges are blurred, and clarity of role can be difficult. I hope that helps! Reach out with any follow-up questions."
You can call it a stock rating of say between 0 to 5 or 0 to 10 or whatever scale you want to use.  It should not be called a recommendation but rather a rating based on the criterial you have analysed. Also a scale from say 0 to 5 is better than using terms like buy, hold and sell.
I feel like IRR is the tool you want to use for this, then you can look at your output and determine if it's higher than what your discount rate is likely to be.  Similarly, you can just do a traditional NPV analysis and then examine the sensitivity by changing the discount rate. If you're safely in profitable territory then you're probably fine despite not knowing the discount rate.
Follow ups: 1) A fair salary would be a competitive market wage for the position you hold within the business. What is left over would be considered true profits and not just fabricated profits by taking a lower than market wage to boost the appearance of profitability. 2) Shareholders requesting salary information would be covered in your Operating Agreement or Shareholder Agreement. This might be terms you set with your investors. Or you might simply set a term that you only need approval if a single salary exceeds a cap (like $250,000). Which would mean you would need to present why you deserve a higher salary and have your board approve (if you are governed by said board via your investors). Profitability is a different ballpark. Your investors most likely have a right to see a monthly, quarterly, and/or annual Profit & Loss statement which should clearly state profitability. I can't imagine running a completely closed book company to my investors. Actually... I can't really imagine ever investing in a company where I am not permitted to see the financials. Something to also consider here is the threat of trying to keep your profit numbers low in order to not pay taxes or to pay yourself a higher salary. If you ever plan to sell or exit the company, most widely accepted valuations of a business are done from profits (or EBIDTA). You might think you are saving yourself a couple points on taxes by avoiding profits in the short term, but if you exit the business and get a 3-5X (or even up to 12X in some cases) multiplier on your annual profits, you might be kicking yourself for trying to hide them through your accounting practices. Buyers will often sniff out an owner who created false profits by not paying themselves, but what's harder to do is figure out how much profits should have been when there were none on the books. By saving yourself $100,000 in taxes this year, could add up to close to $1,000,000 in an acquisition. Good luck."
Since you have the balance at equal periods and the cash flows at the period ends, the best return calculation in this case is the true time-weighted return. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-weighted_return#Formulae  So, notwithstanding some ambiguity about your figures, here is a calculation using the first three periods from your second table. Giving a total return over the three periods of -23.88% If the periods are months, multiply by four to annualise.
I believe this will be looking at ways the business can measure it’s success, non financially.  Business might look at things such as:  Customer satisfaction,   Whether customers make repeat purchases,   Labour/Employee turnover- how many employees quit and are replaced.   Hopefully that gives you the right idea and you can add on to it.  Sorry just have to add as I just did business ALevel, when ever you write any answer in business, ask your self after every paragraph “is that in context”. You might talk about the most amazing things which really impress who ever is marking, but if it doesn’t relate to the business, you get a big 0 :(
The short answer: it depends. The long answer.. Off the top of my head, there are quite a number of factors that an analyst may look at when analyzing a stock, to come up with a recommendation.  Some example factors to look at include: The list goes on.  Quite literally, any and all factors are fair game for a recommendation.  So, the question isn't really what analysts do with financial data, it is what do analysts do with financial data that meets your investment needs? As an example, if you have two analysts, one who is focused on growth stocks, and one who is focused on dividend growth, they may have completely different views on a company.  If both analysts were to analyze Apple (AAPL) 5 years ago, the dividend analyst would likely say SELL or at the most HOLD, because back then Apple did not have a dividend.  However, an analyst focused on growth would likely have said BUY, because Apple appeared to be on a clear upward trend in terms of growth.  Likewise, if you have analysts who are focused on shorting stocks, and ones who are focused on deep value investing, the sell analyst may be selling SELL because they are confident the stock will go down in price, so you can make money on the short position.  Conversely, the deep value investor may be saying BUY, because they believe that based on the companies strong balance sheet, and recent shake-ups in management the stock will eventually turn around.  Two completely different views for the same company: the analyst focused on shorting is looking to make money by capitalizing on falling share price, while the analyst focused on deep value is looking for unloved companies in a tailspin whom s/he believe will turn around, the thesis being that if you dollar-cost-average as the price drops, when it corrects, you'll reap the rewards. That all said, to answer the question about what analysts look for: So really, you should be looking for analysts who align with your investment style, and use those recommendations as a starting point for your own purchases.  Personally, I am a dividend investor, so I have passed many BUY recommendations from analysts and my former broker because those were based on growth stories.  That does not mean that the analysts, my former broker, or myself, are wrong.  But we were all incorrect given the context of how I invest, and what they recommend.
"Dividends are one way to discriminate between companies to invest in. In the best of all worlds, your investment criteria is simple: ""invest in whatever makes me the most money on the timeline I want to have it."" If you just follow that one golden rule, your future financial needs will be taken care of! Oh... you're not 100% proof positive certain which investment is best for you? Good. You're mortal. None of us magically know the best investment for us. We wing it, based on what information we can glean. For instance, we know that bonds tend to be ""safer"" than stocks, but with a lower return, so if something calls itself a bond, we treat it differently than we treat a stock. So what sorts of information do we have? Well, think of the stock market linguistically. A dividend is one way for a company to communicate with their stockholders in the best way possible: their pocketbooks. There's some generally agreed upon behaviors dividends have (such as they don't go down without some good reason for it, like a global recession or a plan to acquire another company that is well-accepted by the stockholders). If a company starts to talk in this language, people expect them to behave a certain way. If they don't, the stock gets blacklisted fast. A dividend itself isn't a big deal, but a dividend which isn't shunned by a lot of smart investors... that can be a big deal. A dividend is a ""promise"" (which can be broken, of course) to cash out some of the company's profits to its shareholders. Its probably one of the older tools out there (""you give investors a share of the profits"" is pretty tried and true). It worked for many types of companies. If you see a dividend, especially one which has been reliable for many years, you can presume something about the type of company they are. Other companies find dividend is a poor tool to accomplish their goals. That doesn't mean they're better or worse, simply different.
You need to distinguish a company's guidance from analysts' estimates. A company will give a revenue/earnings guidance which is generally based on internal budgets. The guidance  may be aggressive or conservative - some managements are known to be conservative and the market will take that into account to form actual estimates. When you see a headline saying that a company missed, it is generally by reference to the analysts' estimates. Analysts use a company's guidance as one data point among many others to form a forecast of revenue/earnings. The idea behind those headlines is that the average sales/earnings estimates of analysts is a good approximation of what the market expects (which is debatable).
I'm a big believer in pulling the quarterly and or annual statements and deriving your own analysis.  The automated parsing systems at Google, Yahoo, and others are a good starting point and they'll let you generally compare various metrics of different companies or market segments.  With that in mind, there are any number of reasons Google's scripts could have broken out or combined a couple of cash flow line items.  If you're digging this deep in the weeds on this company you should pull the SEC filings and build out your own data.