Financial Analysis - Goals

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.

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Famous quotes containing the word goals:

    If you really think about it, everything is wonderful in this world, everything except for our thoughts and deeds when we forget about the loftier goals of existence, about our human dignity.
    Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)

    We should stop looking to law to provide the final answer.... Law cannot save us from ourselves.... We have to go out and try to accomplish our goals and resolve disagreements by doing what we think is right. That energy and resourcefulness, not millions of legal cubicles, is what was great about America. Let judgment and personal conviction be important again.
    Philip K. Howard, U.S. lawyer. The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America, pp. 186-87, Random House (1994)

    I think that any woman who sets goals for herself and takes her own life seriously and moves to achieve the goals that she wants as a person in her own right is a feminist.
    Frances Kuehn (b. 1943)