Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

MARTIN FRIDSON is Managing Director at Merrill Lynch & Company and a member of Institutional Investor’s All-America Fixed Income Research Team. His other books include How to Be a Billionaire, It Was a Very Good Year, and Investment Illusions, all published by Wiley. He is a past governor of the Association for Investment Management and Research.

FERNANDO ALVAREZ is Clinical Associate Professor in the Berkley Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at the Stern School of Business at NYU. His current research focuses on the management of cash flows resulting from changes in working capital requirements, the structure of cash flows, and the sources and uses of capital for the entrepreneurial firm. His research has been funded by the MacArthur Foundation, the Kaufman Foundation, U.S. Trust of Boston, and Wells Fargo Bank.

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Praise for Financial Statement Analysis
A Practitioner?s Guide
Third Edition
University Edition

"This is an illuminating and insightful tour of financial statements, how they can be used to inform, how they can be used to mislead, and how they can be used to analyze the financial health of a company."
?Professor Jay O. Light
Harvard Business School

"Financial Statement Analysis should be required reading for anyone who puts a dime to work in the securities markets or recommends that others do the same."
?Jack L. Rivkin
Executive Vice President (retired)
Citigroup Investments

"Fridson and Alvarez provide a valuable practical guide for understanding, interpreting, and critically assessing financial reports put out by firms. Their discussion of profits??quality of earnings??is particularly insightful given the recent spate of reporting problems encountered by firms. I highly recommend their book to anyone interested in getting behind the numbers as a means of predicting future profits and stock prices."
?Paul Brown
Chair?Department of Accounting
Leonard N. Stern School of Business, NYU

"Let this book assist in financial awareness and transparency and higher standards of reporting, and accountability to all stakeholders."
?Patricia A. Small
Treasurer Emeritus, University of California
Partner, KCM Investment Advisors

"This book is a polished gem covering the analysis of financial statements. It is thorough, skeptical, and extremely practical in its review."
?Daniel J. Fuss
Vice Chairman
Loomis, Sayles & Company, LP

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Financial Statement Analysis

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

Financial statement analysis is an essential skill in a variety of occupations including investment management, corporate finance, commercial lending, and the extension of credit. For individuals engaged in such activities, or who analyze financial data in connection with their personal investment decisions, there are two distinct approaches to the task.

The first is to follow a prescribed routine, filling in boxes with standard financial ratios, calculated according to precise and inflexible definitions. It may take little more effort or mental exertion than this to satisfy the formal requirements of many positions in the field of financial analysis. Operating in a purely mechanical manner, though, will not provide much of a professional challenge. Neither will a rote completion of all of the "proper" standard analytical steps ensure a useful, or even a nonharmful, result. Some individuals, however, will view such problems as only minor drawbacks.

This book is aimed at the analyst who will adopt the second and more rewarding alternative, the relentless pursuit of accurate financial profiles of the entities being analyzed. Tenacity is essential because financial statements often conceal more than they reveal. To the analyst who pursues this proactive approach, producing a standard spreadsheet on a company is a means rather than an end. Investors derive but little satisfaction from the knowledge that an untimely stock purchase recommendation was supported by the longest row of figures available in the software package. Genuinely valuable analysis begins after all the usual questions have been answered. Indeed, a superior analyst adds value by raising questions that are not even on the checklist.

Some readers may not immediately concede the necessity of going beyond an analytical structure that puts all companies on a uniform, objective scale. They may recoil at the notion of discarding the structure altogether when a sound assessment depends on factors other than comparisons of standard financial ratios. Comparability, after all, is a cornerstone of generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP). It might therefore seem to follow that financial statements prepared in accordance with GAAP necessarily produce fair and useful indications of relative value.

The corporations that issue financial statements, moreover, would appear to have a natural interest in facilitating convenient, cookie-cutter analysis. These companies spend heavily to disseminate information about their financial performance. They employ investor-relations managers, they communicate with existing and potential shareholders via interim financial reports and press releases, and they dispatch senior management to periodic meetings with securities analysts. Given that companies are so eager to make their financial results known to investors, they should also want it to be easy for analysts to monitor their progress. It follows that they can be expected to report their results in a transparent and straightforward fashion ... or so it would seem.

THE PURPOSE OF FINANCIAL REPORTING

Analysts who believe in the inherent reliability of GAAP numbers and the good faith of corporate managers misunderstand the essential nature of financial reporting. Their conceptual error connotes no lack of intelligence, however. Rather, it mirrors the standard accounting textbook's idealistic but irrelevant notion of the purpose of financial reporting. Even Howard Schilit (see the MicroStrategy discussion, later in this chapter), an acerbic critic of financial reporting as it is actually practiced, presents a high-minded view of the matter:

The primary goal in financial reporting is the dissemination of financial statements that accurately measure the profitability and financial condition of a company.

Missing from this formulation is an indication of whose primary goal is accurate measurement. Schilit's words are music to the ears of the financial statements users listed in this chapter's first paragraph, but they are not the ones doing the financial reporting. Rather, the issuers are for-profit companies, generally organized as corporations.

A corporation exists for the benefit of its shareholders. Its objective is not to educate the public about its financial condition, but to maximize its shareholders' wealth. If it so happens that management can advance that objective through "dissemination of financial statements that accurately measure the profitability and financial condition of the company," then in principle, management should do so. At most, however, reporting financial results in a transparent and straightforward fashion is a means unto an end.

Management may determine that a more direct method of maximizing shareholder wealth is to reduce the corporation's cost of capital. Simply stated, the lower the interest rate at which a corporation can borrow or the higher the price at which it can sell stock to new investors, the greater is the wealth of its shareholders. From this standpoint, the best kind of financial statement is not one that represents the corporation's condition most fully and most fairly, but rather one that produces the highest possible credit rating (see Chapter 13) and price-earnings multiple (see Chapter 14). If the highest ratings and multiples result from statements that measure profitability and financial condition inaccurately, the logic of fiduciary duty to shareholders obliges management to publish that sort, rather than the type held up as a model in accounting textbooks. The best possible outcome is a cost of capital lower than the corporation deserves on its merits. This admittedly perverse argument can be summarized in the following maxim, presented from the perspective of issuers of financial statements:

The purpose of financial reporting is to obtain cheap capital.

Attentive readers will raise two immediate objections. First, they will say, it is fraudulent to obtain capital at less than a fair rate by presenting an unrealistically bright financial picture. Second, some readers will argue that misleading the users of financial statements is not a sustainable strategy over the long run. Stock market investors who rely on overstated historical profits to project a corporation's future earnings will find that results fail to meet their expectations. Thereafter, they will adjust for the upward bias in the financial statements by projecting lower earnings than the historical results would otherwise justify. The outcome will be a stock valuation no higher than accurate reporting would have produced. Recognizing that the practice would be self-defeating, corporations will logically refrain from overstating their financial performance. By this reasoning, the users of financial statements can take the numbers at face value, because corporations that act in their self-interest will report their results honestly.

The inconvenient fact that confounds these arguments is that financial statements do not invariably reflect their issuers' performance faithfully. In lieu of easily understandable and accurate data, users of financial statements often find numbers that conform to GAAP yet convey a misleading impression of profits. Worse yet, outright violations of the accounting rules come to light...