Historical quotesBusiness Librarian: Steve Cramer
smcramer@uncg.edu
336-256-0346
AIM & Google Talk: stevebizlib
Windows Messenger: smcramer@uncg.ed
Yahoo! Finance Historical Quotes
- Provides daily stock prices (not just charts).
- You can enter the start and end dates as well as specify daily, weekly, monthly, or dividends.
- Coverage of some stocks goes back to 1970.
- You can also download data in spreadsheet format (look for the link under the chart).
Mergent Horizon (5 concurrent users)
- Covers around 6,200 public companies (NYSE, NASDAQ, and AMEX companies).
- Provides peer-group, competitive analysis, and merger and acquisition analysis tools.
- Includes detailed stock performance data, including historical data back to 1991
2. Annual reportsA public company sends its annual report to all its stockholders, but also makes the report available to the general public. Annual reports usually have two sections:
- An illustrated promotional section, typically written by the company's public relations department. This section "sells" the company as a good investment. It may describe with words and pictures their successful brands, major changes, new business strategies, market share, employees, and customers.
- A financial data section. Look in this section for the balance sheet and income statement. Unlike the 10-K report filed with the SEC, the financial data in annual reports is not audited by external auditors. Therefore a 10-K report is a more authoritative source for corporate financials.
Find the web site of the company. Most companies provide their most recent annual reports in PDF or HTML format. On the company homepage, look for a link labeled something like "For Investors," "Stockholder Info," or "Corporate Info."
- Provides detailed financials and descriptions of 42,000 worldwide public companies.
- Covers product, service, and business lines, sales by continents and product lines, balance sheets, income and cash flow statements, ratios, stock, bond, and earnings information, top shareholders, subsidiaries, board members, senior executives and their salaries, and merger and acquisitions.
- Data can be exporting into Excel.
- Companies can be easily compared using the Peer Report and Peer Analysis tabs.
- S&P NetAdvantage also provides financials, but only covers US-traded stocks.
Mergent Horizon (5 concurrent users)
- Covers around 6,200 public companies (NYSE, NASDAQ, and AMEX companies) and hundreds of product and service sectors.
- Provides detailed hypertext product and service hierarchies for each company.
- Identifies competitors, customers, suppliers, and partners.
- Provides peer-group, competitive analysis, and merger and acquisition analysis tools.
- Company descriptions include stock performance and history, earnings and revenue estimates, detailed financial statements, institutional holdings, key ratios, insider trading, segment financials, and officers and directors.
- Includes an events calendar and a powerful stock screener.
For public companies, these sources usually provide biographies of officers, detailed financial information, stock reports, news, analyses of business strategies and recent developments, and more.
Examples: MarketLine, Osiris, S&P NetAdvantage
To learn about the context of a company's work, and to compare a company to its competitors, use industry analyses. A complete industrial analysis usually includes a review of that industries' recent performance, its current status, and an outlook for the future. Many analyses include a combination of text and statistical data.
Examples: S&P NetAdvantage, MarketLine, IBIS
Articles from Magazines, Trade Journals, etc.
Articles from trade journals, business newspapers, and general business magazines are often the best sources of current information and analysis. They are an especially important source of information for private companies.
Examples: Business Source Premier, General OneFile
