Financial Analysis Paper Sections
Section A
Computations
Using the Excel template, compute the ratios for the four most recent quarters of your chosen company. Sources of free data include Yahoo Finance, Bloomberg and MSN Money. Research at least three Web sites to obtain the most accurate and reliable information. By using at least three sources, you will be able to select the financial information from two of the sources with the most closely corresponding information.
Section B
Financial Trend Comparison
For each of the five ratio categories: Liquidity, Asset Utilization, Profitability, Debt Utilization, and Market Values, write a paragraph regarding the trend and implications about the future financial health of the company.
Section C
Comparative Financial Analysis of the company compared to the industry performance.
Write a paragraph regarding your company’s comparative performance to the industry average for the most recent year.
Section D
Complete a Comparative SWOT ANALYSIS for your company:
- Strengths
- Weaknesses
- Opportunities
- Threats
Section E
Business ethics, as defined by Corporate Finance text authors’ Ehrhardt and Brigham, “are a company’s attitude and conduct toward its employees, customers, community, and stockholders” . In this section, provide an analysis of the ethics of your company that answers the following questions:
- Is there a well-defined code of ethics or code of conduct?
- Is there evidence of continued and repeated emphasis by the Board of Directors or the CEO, of the importance of ethical conduct to the corporation and its business ventures?
- What processes are in place (if any) that make it safe and easy for employees or other interested parties to report ethical lapse?
Include documentation from your research that supports your analysis of the ethics of your company.
Section F
Conclusion and Decisions
Based on the analyses above, arrive at a conclusion by writing a paragraph for each of the following three decisions. You must support your conclusions with reasoned statements as to why or why not.
Decisions
- Would you place a personal deposit of one million dollars or more in the publicly traded stock of this company?
- Would you invest $500,000 in the debt (bonds) of this company?
- If you were a member of the Board of Directors of a bank and you sat on that Bank’s Credit Committee, would you grant a one million dollar line of credit for Overnight or Term Federal Funds to this company?
Bibliography
All sources are to be shown in accordance with APA manual of style, including Web pages.
Employ a minimum of three sources with proper citations and incorporate your research into your essay. Include footnotes or endnotes, as well as works cited, at the conclusion of your paper. If information is downloaded from the Internet, make sure you put the date it was accessed.
If quoting anything either directly or indirectly, give credit where credit is due with quotation marks as well as footnotes, endnotes or in text citations. F