1.2 Overview of Valuation Tutor

Click on SEC Filings:  Visual Analytics to bring up the opening screen.  At the time of taking this screen shot it happened to be the filings for 1-800-Flowers.

Attention immediately focuses upon current financials which even for a small stock’s current 10-Q reveals a large amount of current reporting details:

For the second part of the software:  Financial Ratios:  A Visual Analysis the user is able to work with pre-processed data files:

By selecting the current FTS dataset provides access to preprocessed current data for over 3,000 major companies listed on US exchanges.  Again for the current screen this starts with 1-800-Flowers:

The screen elements are powerful and straightforward:

Top left hand corner provides immediate access to common size analysis, business ratios, price ratios, cost volume profit and activity analysis and more.  Top right hand side provides an immediate competitor analysis, bottom right hand side industry analysis and bottom left hand side sector analysis.  In other words you can immediately adopt either a bottom up or top down approach to financial statement analysis.

Finally, the third major component is:  Intrinsic Value Models.  This brings up the following opening screen:

This screen puts the user in control of a powerful set of analytical valuation models.  This starts with the basic Dividend Model and the concept of cost of capital.  It then proceeds to four major valuation models:

Free Cash Flow Model

Residual Income Model

Abnormal Earnings Growth Model

Merton’s option based model for distressed stocks.

Default data is provided but this third part relies on combing user judgment for refining important input variables combined with the guidance of the technology.

So from the brief introduction above we hope this clarifies what we mean when we initially asserted the following:

Emphasis is placed upon working with current information that is relevant to today’s decisions so that learning becomes fun and useful.  In turn this motivates acquiring a deeper understanding and the three main application listed above are designed to reinforce this sequential approach to learning.