The case in hand: You are a financial analyst. A person with minimum or no financial knowledge approaches you to get some help regarding his/her investment plan. He selects two firms and wants to know which firm he should invest in. As a financial analyst your responsibility is to advise the person as to which firm he should invest.
How to proceed:
- Download financial statements/data of two firms/companies for at least five years.
- Analyse each company’s following financial performances for five years (at least)
- Leverage
- Asset utilization
- Liquidity
- Profitability
- Cash flow
- Make comparative analysis of each firm’s financial performances in the light of above criteria
- Make a recommendation as to which firm is better for investment.
While analysing firm’s performance you must consider the industry in which the firm operates.
Format of the assignment
The assignment should have the following sections:
- Executive summary: Summarise the whole report to reflect the problem and findings of the report.
- Introduction: In this section briefly discuss the importance/significance of financial statement analysis for investment purpose and introduce the case.
- Identification of the issues: This section should include the problem in hand, that is, what the report is going to do/analyse and why. In doing so you must discuss the nature of the businesses of the selected firms. This will help comparing the ratios/performance indicators of the selected firms.
- Financial analysis: In this section show your calculations of the ratios and performance indicators (mentioned above) of two firms and discuss their relative strengths and weaknesses.
- recommendations: In this section make your recommendation based on the analyses made in section (3).
