The Analysis of Financial Statements

Lecture Notes from the year 2017 in the subject Economics - Finance, grade: 1,3, language: English, abstract: Large (global) companies are trained to stretch federal law for their own benefit. With financial statement analysis, such tricks of the firms can be identified and the company’s intrinsic value will be revealed. For sure, it is hard work to do and it is furthermore very time-consuming, but it is worth the pain when your investments pay off. This text will introduce the most important adjustments you can undertake to correct the financial statements from so-called window-dressing. A quick look at the actual and previous balance sheets of the Swedish clothing retailer H&M raises the question how they managed to keep their liabilities that low. This is mainly due to the excessive usage of (operating) lease agreements which aren’t shown in the balance sheet as liability; only the rent expense is included in the statement of profit & loss. Many investors, therefore, deem H&M to be a very stable and profitable enterprise. Such misbeliefs can lead to high losses of the investors or even to a global financial crisis as seen 2007/08.