Bus349: Corporate Finance 2021: What's happening?

If you want to see what newspapers and magazines are saying about your company, check out one of the two databases below:

SWOT is an acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats. It's a common approach in the business world to evaluating a company's prospects.

The annual report is the primary document through which public companies make financial information available to their shareholders, as required by law. (Keep in mind that annual reports are often used as a public relations tool by the companies -- though the financial information should be reliable, the written text accompanying the report is written by the company itself). Annual reports are often made available on company websites, in addition to their availability in the Mergent Online database, linked below.

You may wish to view a company's stock price movements over the past X number of years to evaluate how investors have judged the company's efforts. Keep in mind -- broader forces than a company's actions may effect the stock price. You'll want to compare stock price swings with the market as a whole, and to competitors, to better evaluate how a company has fared.

To understand trends over time, use moving averages to lessen the graphical power of spikes/dips.