2.10 Summary and Conclusion
The major objective of this chapter was to introduce you to the
source company filing that is now available so that you can
learn-by-doing to become acquainted with the Interactive Data
Disclosure applied to real world companies.
In fact, today this document is so comprehensive and the
disclosures are made under the implied penalties and conditions
required from two major Acts:
the Regulation Fair Disclosure or Regulation FD of August
2000 and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 which overhauled
regulation in relation to public company accounting reforms and
investor protection.
Both of these acts have ensured that the content and the reports
filed with the SEC are more credible than ever before.
Management provides frank assessments of their business
and it is the necessary starting place for any analyst who is
attempting to understand the nature of the business.
As we discussed in the introduction, the overriding
objective that governs disclosures today is transparency.
This includes making it more difficult to re-engineer
consolidated financial statements by creating special purposes
entities that technically may escape consolidation.
In this chapter, we described the four major financial
statements. In subsequent chapters you will learn how to work
with the data. In
the next chapter, you will learn how to measure business
efficiency in the context of a company’s business strategy.