Intermediate

01

Every listed company publishes three core financial statements. Together they tell the full story of a company's financial health, if you know how to read them.

02

A financial statement isn't a neutral photograph of a business, it's the output of accounting choices. Here's what those choices are, and why the same year can look very different depending on which number you're reading.

03

The three financial statements aren't three separate documents, they're one connected story told from three angles. Here's how they link together, and how to use that connection to check whether a company's earnings are as good as they look.

04

How a company funds itself and returns cash to shareholders shapes their outcome as much as how much profit it makes. Here's how to think about debt versus equity, buybacks versus dividends, and how to track whether shareholders are gaining ground or being quietly diluted away.

05

A business model tells you how a company makes money. A moat tells you whether it can keep making it that way, and here's how to test for evidence instead of just a good story.

06

A 10% margin can be excellent in one sector and mediocre in another. Here's how to classify what kind of business you're looking at, and why that changes what every number means.

07

The same income statement looks completely different depending on the size of the company. Margins strip away size and let you compare any two companies, or a company against its own past, on equal footing.

08

Margins tell you how profitable a company is. Ratios go one step further and tell you whether the stock price reflects that profitability fairly, generously, or not at all.

09

Ratios fall into four categories, each answering a different question about a company. Knowing which category a ratio belongs to tells you what it is measuring, and what it cannot tell you.

10

Beyond the four foundational ratio categories, there are three more that experienced investors use to assess how efficiently a company deploys its capital, uses its assets, and rewards its shareholders.

11

A P/E ratio means nothing until you know who it's being compared to. Here's how to build a peer group that holds up, and what to do when a company doesn't have a clean one.

12

A company's own trading history is a peer group of one. Learn how to read the way revenue, margins, profits, and the balance sheet have changed over time, build a historical valuation range, and judge when a return to the average is a fair expectation and when the business has simply moved on.

13

A DCF does not predict the future, it makes your assumptions about a company's future cash flows explicit enough to question. Here is how the standard method, terminal value and all, fits together.

14

Every number we use comes from somewhere. Here's exactly where to find it yourself, for free, without a Bloomberg terminal or a paid research subscription.