Choose any public company and compute the thirteen ratios as outlined in the textbook on pages 53 to 60. A public company is any company that issues shares to the general public, and under Securities and Exchange Commission rules, must issue public financial statements. Most of our major, commonplace corporations are public corporations.
You are to utilize the financial statements for the latest available year, and you can obtain these online in the Edgar database at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) website at www.sec.gov. Once you are at the SEC's homepage, click the "Search for Company filings". You can then type the company name and obtain financial reports. The report you want is the annual financial report called a 10-K. It will have all the data you need.
The Edgar database is very sensitive to company names being exactly spelled as a legal entity. For example, I put in the company name box "Coke" and "Coca-Cola" and the database responded with no listings. The exact name that eventually worked was "Coca Cola Co", also "Coca" worked as well, bringing up all company names with that first name. What I would recommend before going to Edgar is to look up the correct company name at a more user friendly website such as Yahoo. At Yahoo, their finance component enabled me to be a bit more inexact at the beginning and gave me some choices so I eventually ended up with the "Real Thing". Ha. Ha.
In your written response, you should attach the relevant pages from the financial statements, perhaps circling them to show where you obtained the information. Please also provide the Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) number, and description of the code which is on the first page of the financial statement. This is necessary for part II of this exercise, which will be assigned at the end of the month. For example, the SIC number for General Motors Corp is 3711, Motor Vehicle and Passenger Car Bodies.