The Five Rules for Successful Stock Investing 5

The Language of Investing

As an investor, you're mainly going to be interested in the balance sheet, the income statement, and the statement of cash flows. These three tables are your windows into corporate performance, and they're the place to start when you're analyzing a company.

The balance sheet is like a company's credit report because it tells you how much the company owns (assets) relative to what it owes (liabilities) at a specific point in time. [...] 

The income statement, meanwhile, tells how much the company made or lost in accounting profits during a year or a quarter. Unlike the balance sheet [...] the income statement records revenues and expenses over a set period, such as a fiscal year. 

Finally, there's the statement of cash flows, which records all the cash that comes into a company and all of the cash that goes out. The statement of cash flows ties the income statement and balance sheet together.

Accrual accounting is a key concept for understanding financial statements. The income statement matches sales with the corresponding expenses when a service or a good is provided to the buyer, but the cash flow statement is concerned only with when cash is received and when it goes out the door.

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