Chapter 1: Introduction

 

Valuation Tutor provides the visual and analytical tools to analyze the financial statements and reports filed by publicly listed companies in the US. The system is divided into three parts:

SEC Filings:  Visual Analysis of SEC Filings

Financial Ratios:  Visual Analytics

Intrinsic Value Models

Emphasis is placed upon working with current information, relevant to today’s decisions, so that learning becomes fun and useful.  Ultimately this motivates acquiring a deeper understanding valuation which is important to both preparers and consumers of financial reports.  Valuation Tutor is designed to reinforce this sequential approach to learning. 

The next topic will develop this assertion further, however, working with real world filings ensures that you acquire the same skills used by today’s management, financial analysts and preparers of the corporate reports.  The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in their Occupational Outlook Handbook (2010-11), forecasts that these skills are in strong demand. 

Valuation Tutor starts with the corporate filings (10-K, 20-F and 10-Q), including supporting sub statements, and focuses upon extracting summary information from these filings to analyze a company and its immediate competitors. 

For example, consider the screen below:

This provides a view of trends for Coca-Cola with respect to their reported Gross Profit and Operating Income over time.  Pie chart analytics then permit the immediate depiction of the same data to better understand the relative trends.

There are many details in a modern corporate report, and the screen below depicts a small sample of these support statements in Coca-Cola’s 10-K:

The next topic illustrates how you can use Valuation Tutor to work with the data adopting either a bottom up or top down approach to evaluating fundamentals.