Goals
Financial analysts often assess the following elements of a firm:
1. Profitability - its ability to earn income and sustain growth in both the short- and long-term. A company's degree of profitability is usually based on the income statement, which reports on the company's results of operations;
2. Solvency - its ability to pay its obligation to creditors and other third parties in the long-term;
3. Liquidity - its ability to maintain positive cash flow, while satisfying immediate obligations;
Both 2 and 3 are based on the company's balance sheet, which indicates the financial condition of a business as of a given point in time.
4. Stability - the firm's ability to remain in business in the long run, without having to sustain significant losses in the conduct of its business. Assessing a company's stability requires the use of both the income statement and the balance sheet, as well as other financial and non-financial indicators. etc.
Read more about this topic: Financial Analysis
Famous quotes containing the word goals:
“Despicable means used to achieve laudable goals renders the goals themselves despicable.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“If people would forget about utopia! When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there’d be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it.”
—Nadine Gordimer (b. 1923)
“We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have some sense of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be. The question is not what we can do now for the hypothetical Mexican, the hypothetical Negro. The question is what we really want out of life, for ourselves, what we think is real.”
—James Baldwin (1924–1987)