Financial Ratio Tutorial

Financial Ratio Tutorial
By Richard Loth (Contact | Biography)

When it comes to investing, analyzing financial statement information (also known as quantitative analysis), is one of, if not the most important element in the fundamental analysis process. At the same time, the massive amount of numbers in a company's financial statements can be bewildering and intimidating to many investors. However, through financial ratio analysis, you will be able to work with these numbers in an organized fashion.

The objective of this tutorial is to provide you with a guide to sources of financial statement data, to highlight and define the most relevant ratios, to show you how to compute them and to explain their meaning as investment evaluators.

In this regard, we draw your attention to the complete set of financials for Zimmer Holdings, Inc. (ZMH), a publicly listed company on the NYSE that designs, manufactures and markets orthopedic and related surgical products, and fracture-management devices worldwide. We've provided these statements in order to be able to make specific reference to the account captions and numbers in Zimmer's financials in order to illustrate how to compute all the ratios.

Among the dozens of financial ratios available, we've chosen 30 measurements that are the most relevant to the investing process and organized them into six main categories as per the following list:

1) Liquidity Measurement Ratios

• - Current Ratio
• - Quick Ratio
• - Cash Ratio
• - Cash Conversion Cycle

2) Profitability Indicator Ratios

• - Profit Margin Analysis
• - Effective Tax Rate
• - Return On Assets
• - Return On Equity
• - Return On Capital Employed

3) Debt Ratios

• - Overview Of Debt
• - Debt Ratio
• - Debt-Equity Ratio
• - Capitalization Ratio
• - Interest Coverage Ratio
• - Cash Flow To Debt Ratio

4) Operating Performance Ratios

• - Fixed-Asset Turnover
• - Sales/Revenue Per Employee
• - Operating Cycle

5) Cash Flow Indicator Ratios

• - Operating Cash Flow/Sales Ratio
• - Free Cash Flow/Operating Cash Ratio
• - Cash Flow Coverage Ratio
• - Dividend Payout Ratio

6) Investment Valuation Ratios

• - Per Share Data
• - Price/Book Value Ratio
• - Price/Cash Flow Ratio
• - Price/Earnings Ratio
• - Price/Earnings To Growth Ratio
• - Price/Sales Ratio
• - Dividend Yield
• - Enterprise Value Multiple

Read more: http://www.investopedia.com/university/ratios/#ixzz1iiTyzb3S


Also read:

7 Courses Finance Students Should Take

http://myinvestingnotes.blogspot.com/2011/12/7-courses-finance-students-should-take.html