In your academic and professional endeavors, you will be required to present business and financial analyses of a new project or an existing organization. You may require the historical data of financial statements, stock prices, and financial ratios. These tasks can be simplified greatly if you follow the tips that are mentioned below:
Annual Reports
The first and primary source of financial information for analyzing the performance of any company is its annual reports. If the company is a listed company, you may find annual reports on the website of the country’s stock exchange. On the corporate website of a company, these reports are listed under the section ‘Investor Relations’. For example, International Consolidated Airlines Group (IAG) is a multinational airline holding company with its global headquarters in London, England. The annual reports of the group can be accessed on the corporate website https://www.iairgroup.com under the tab ‘Investors and shareholders’ at https://www.iairgroup.com/en/investors-and-shareholders/results-and-reports
Yahoo Finance
Another great source of information for historical data is Yahoo Finance. Here, you can find a summary of the financial indicators of listed companies. You can also view historical data for the selected date range and frequency (daily, weekly, monthly). The data grid shows historical stock prices, dividends, stock splits, and capital gain. You can also download the filtered data in a CSV file for further analysis. For example, the IAG group is listed on London Stock Exchange with the code IAG.L. The historical data for the year 2020 can be viewed and downloaded by selecting parameters at this link: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/IAG.L/history?p=IAG.L
Statista
Statista is also a highly useful statistics portal and contains insights and facts across 170 industries and 150+ countries. Some of the statistics are available only in the premium version. However, still, you can access a variety of information free of cost by accessing Statista at https://www.statista.com
Other Sources
There are also other helpful links on the web that will ease your task of financial analysis. These are as follows:
- https://www.investing.com
- https://www.macrotrends.net
- https://www.bloomberg.com
- https://www.morningstar.com
- Morning Star Data Analysis
- https://www.myaccountingcourse.com/financial-ratios
- https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/finance/corporate-finance-ratios
- Australian Financial Review
- The Australian
- https://tradingeconomics.com
- HSBC Exchange rate calculator
- Reserve Bank of Australia
- World Bank
- The International Monetary Fund World Economic Outlook
- Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development
- ABI/INFORM Collection ProQuest
- Business Source Complete EBSCO
- Factiva
- https://search.informit.org
- Annual Report Collection
- Company360
- Hoover’s Company Records
- Osiris
- IBISWorld
- Canadian Industry Statistics
- https://www.investornetwork.com
- https://www.abstractops.com/how-to-make-a-pro-forma-income-statement
- https://bench.co/blog/accounting/pro-forma-financial-statements
- https://getpoindexter.com/blog/pro-forma-balance-sheet-in-5-steps
- https://www.clydebankmedia.com/definitions/business/statement-cash-flows