On the finance reports, How do I find the common stocks? how are they listed?
dj asked:
Basically, when I am reading the financial reports, I do not know what the common stocks are.
Basically, when I am reading the financial reports, I do not know what the common stocks are.
do you know anything about finance?
if you are reading the financial report of mcdonalds it all relates to the stocks.
the income statement, statement of retained earnings, balence sheet, and statement of cash flows represent the company as a whole. dividing these total by the number of common shares outstanding gives you the reults on a per share basis.
mcd is the ticker for mcdonalds and will be represented as such in these documents.
financial reports tell u more or less how the company did as a whole, and is generally expected you will look at the EPS or earnings per share yourself.
if you do not know the ticker symbol, just type the the name of the corporation into the search menu on yahoo finance.
basically go to finance.yahoo.com and look on the main listing and you will find “Number of Shares Outstanding”. That is technically the number of common shares of stock outstanding. This tells you how many shares are issued and informs the firms target capital structure (i.e. composition of funding sources that makes up how the firms operates)
However, if you are looking for widely held stocks (i.e. they are common because many people/investors/institutions hold them) check out the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DOW). This is an index of 30 stocks that represent blue chip firms. If you want to know what tech stocks are common, check out the NASDAQ, generally understood to be tech based companies.
If you mean finding common stocks to be the book value of common stock, check out the “Stockholder’s Equity” section of a firms balance sheet. This will give you an audited look at the value of the common stock in proportion to the firms overall book worth (remember Assets = Liabilities + Stockholders Equity)
Anything financial you read they will be listed as a ticker which usually looks like and abreviation. For example, Walmart is WMT, referring to Walmart’s stock.