I have been involved with stock trading for about 50 years...Options about 30 years. I took several business classes in college, but never got into a basic accounting class..."Recapture my ass"!! When you're 20 years old, you're not thinking about things like that. I'll tell you the 4 Ps of marketing... I have learned many of the basics from being a business owner... In general, determining a company's ratios is difficult for me. Are there any (free) stock evaluators out there that shine red flags when their ratios appear off too much?? Thanks...
There are some special figures of merit that people have invented to look for fraud. I've looked at this one before https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/beneishmodel.asp It's hard to do in a general sense because different types of businesses have radically different financial structures. Look at the ratios for a coal mine oil refinery vs a tech company. Still, there's some common sense that one can apply. For example, when a company hits a sky high PE ratio, that potential means a very small increase in earnings can create a huge increase in market cap. It becomes tempting to to book revenue to drive up thearket cap whether it's real or not. The CFO behind the Crazy Eddie fraud has a creat site about how to see through fraud: https://whitecollarfraud.com/crazy-eddie/crazy-eddie-red-flags/ Generally I would say look at financials for a a competitor. Do the differences make sense? Is one company claiming to sit on 5x the inventory of the other? Are the auditing costs similar? Does one claim the have a billion dollars of bizarrely structured assets? If you really want to go into detail this looks good https://www.cpestore.com/pdf_courses/AA135701/AA135701_1394290828_book.pdf
I am looking more for companies that will do the leg work for me...I know that is semi cheating. I just don't want to dig into the financials. Companies I trust and ones I don't...Trust; Morning Star, Seeking Alpha (sometimes), Bloomberg. Companies I don't trust; Yahoo! Finance, The Motley Fool. Just wondering if there are any other sites you can think of that is like Morning Star, with a concentration of financial reports?? On second thought, I would be willing to pay up to $20. a month for a subscription to a trusted company that has great knowledge on the financials of corporations... I'm a boring value investor... PS My biggest holding are with the Royce Family of Funds. They do the best job in finding undervalued (well run) companies with solid balance sheets.
lots of companies do it. I think most brokers will provide that as part of their research. However, i don't know if they all do it correctly or consistently. How do they deal with converts? Preffereds? Ownership in foreign entities? Do they make adjustments? Is the book value reasonable? How do they treat cash and marketable securities? It may not even matter to you.
Since you went from free to $20 Stock Rover There are screeners with a free version that my work for you Wall Street Zen,Chartmill..I prefer Stock Rover thne Chart Mill
I think you mentioned you were a Schwab client. They have a lot of in-house capabilities that could be relevant.
Schwab' has a decent screener for basic ratios and such but I don't recall it having things like M-score or Z- score ready to go. I've always had to look for other sites if I want those. This forum could use more boring value investors.