How to cut through the public relations jargon and analyze a company's financial health and future prospects as it's spelled out in an annual report. Sound advice for non-expert investors in the stock market. New topics covered and explained in this edition include annual reports on the Internet, materiality, and financial derivatives. Titles in the easy-to-understand Business Keys series are directed at consumers and non-professionals, with advice on saving, investing, protecting assets, and increasing wealth through prudent money management. The books define terms, cut through business jargon, speak in plain language, and take the mystery out of business.

For courses in Financial Accounting, Financial Reporting, Financial Statement Analysis, Introduction to Business, or MBA finance courses. Understanding the Corporate Annual Report: Nuts, Bolts, and A Few Loose Screws provides a clearly written, step-by-step guide to understanding corporate annual reports. Authors Fraser and Ormiston instruct readers on how to ignore the PR letters from the corporate management team, engaging graphics, and other "garnishes" that typically accompany current annual reports in order to focus on what really counts--a company's performance and financial health! Throughout the text, the authors examine management's attempts to manipulate earnings and other performance measures, and they explain what the numbers in the report really mean.

Annual Reports 101 gets past the PR machine to show the meaning behind the spin. This ultra-practical guide shows you how to thoroughly translate and read "between the lines" of the balance sheet, income statement, cash flow report, and the accompanying text. The book helps you get a true sense of the "big picture" behind the company, allowing you to move beyond the numbers themselves and the fluffy, PR-driven copy. Before you know it, you'll have the tools to spot red flags, decipher footnotes, and see past common practices that, while legal, may not give the most accurate picture.

"All investors, from beginners to old hands, should gain from the use of this guide, as I have." From the Introduction by Michael F. Price, president, Franklin Mutual Advisors, Inc. Benjamin Graham has been called the most important investment thinker of the twentieth century. As a master investor, pioneering stock analyst, and mentor to investment superstars, he has no peer. The volume you hold in your hands is Graham's timeless guide to interpreting and understanding financial statements. It has long been out of print, but now joins Graham's other masterpieces, The Intelligent Investor and Security Analysis, as the three priceless keys to understanding Graham and value investing. The advice he offers in this book is as useful and prescient today as it was sixty years ago. As he writes in the preface, "if you have precise information as to a company's present financial position and its past earnings record, you are better equipped to gauge its future possibilities. And this is the essential function and value of security analysis." Written just three years after his landmark Security Analysis, The Interpretation of Financial Statements gets to the heart of the master's ideas on value investing in astonishingly few pages. Readers will learn to analyze a company's balance sheets and income statements and arrive at a true understanding of its financial position and earnings record. Graham provides simple tests any reader can apply to determine the financial health and well-being of any company. This volume is an exact text replica of the first edition of The Interpretation of Financial Statements, published by Harper & Brothers in 1937. Graham's original language has been restored, and readers can be assured that every idea and technique presented here appears exactly as Graham intended. Highly practical and accessible, it is an essential guide for all business people--and makes the perfect companion volume to Graham's investment masterpiece The Intelligent Investor.