Getting Started in Fundamental Analysis By Michael C. Thomsett

Description

Getting Started in Fundamental Analysis is designed to help you put those tools to work in identifying risk levels, making valid and reliable comparisons, and ultimately in picking stocks for your portfolio. It is this activity—deciding which stocks to buy, how long to hold them, and when to sell—that lies at the center of every investment program. Even if you pick the stock of well-managed, financially sound companies, if your timing is off, your profits will not be at the pace you would hope and expect. Fundamental analysis helps you to quantify value and financial strength; of equal importance, it helps you to time your decisions to maximize the potential for profits in your stock selection.

With this in mind, you need the numbers as a starting point, the information you find in corporate audited financial statements and their footnotes, which includes quarterly filing papers and annual statements. Beyond these sources, you need to know how to read financial news and apply new information to a stock’s value; how to anticipate economic changes in the broad market; and how those changes are likely to affect stocks; and how to identify a company’s position within its industry and sector.

This book, part of the Getting Started In series, provides basic information on the complex topic of fundamental analysis in a way intended to help anyone go through the concepts and definitions without trouble. The combined visual and learning tools—the many practical examples, definitions in context, key points, checklists, and graphics—take vague concepts and put them into real-world action in a way that relates to the same decisions you face as an investor every day.