Fundamental Analysis

The book I read to research this post was Fundamental Analysis For Dummies by Mark Krantz which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. This book is a great introduction to this subject and also contains a lot of more detailed information for those who know quite a lot already. I am new to the subject and had difficulty understanding the more complex stuff but it's an interesting book nonetheless. This book working out if a company is a good prospect to buy shares in. In America companies who are on the stock market have to publish detailed information about things like cash flow and profits in what is called a 10-K. This has to be done within 75 days of the end of the financial year for big companies and within 90 days for smaller companies. Often the vital facts are buried deep within the report. The most important thing to look for is the profits made and how that compares to the outgoings per quarter. A good company should minimize their outgoings and if their profits dried up tomorrow should have enough accumulated profit to keep it going for quite a long time. Bear in mind even if a company looks good on paper the stock exchange is a very fickle place and there is no guarantee buying shares in that company will make a profit. A couple of good financial web sites are http://reuters.com

& http://money.msn.com there is also financial sites owned by Google & Yahoo but these are mentioned in a previous post. Yahoo do business reports which you can find by searching in the Yahoo search engine. Many of these are priced between $10 & $100 but many are free. If you are looking for the most successful shares today try

http://biz.yahoo.com/ic/

A site where you can pick a date and see what the share prices were for a given company is at http://money.usatoday.com

That site is also easy to use. Of course there are lots more web resources in the book and I think this book is essential for any budding investors in shares.