Financial Accounts

[Charlottesquare]

As usual the thread has veered completely off-topic.
The point I wanted to make was that if you were looking for divine inspiration from detailed examination of published accounts you won't find it for two reasons, apart from the issue of veracity.

One is that there is an army of people doing the same thing and the chances of an information gap being discovered by you are vanishingly small.

Secondly, accounts being published now refer to 2022. At the beginning of that year the world was a very different place, world in lockdown and no war in Europe. Investing is about what happens next, not what happened, 16 months ago.

No one knows what will happen next so invest accordingly.

To a point I agree, but broad trends can still be spotted and do often repeat, the key for me was not to fixate on the last 12 months compared with the prior 12 months but maybe look at trends over much longer periods (say 5 years), if I could be bothered (and the older I have become the lest bothered I have become with wading through accounts)

This often meant holding annual accounts in a folder covering multiple years (you used to be able to order past quoted accounts), wading through and creating excel summaries and devoting lots of time and work to your creations.

Given the sums I was investing back then applying such effort to a "maybe" investment of say £15-£20k was frankly disproportionate (life was too short) so I gave up and moved to the Dark Side (Investment Trusts) and apart from some smaller forays( barely researched punts) into individual shares ( right now circa 27% of funds in Shell/Unilever/BHP/BAT/IMP/Smith (DS)/L & G/HSBC/Bellway/Springfield) I am now pretty happy to just buy ITS and virtually forget about them and just observe the dividends. (They also, longer term, and in the round, tend to do better than my punts)

[OhNoNotimAgain]

As usual the thread has veered completely off-topic.
The point I wanted to make was that if you were looking for divine inspiration from detailed examination of published accounts you won't find it for two reasons, apart from the issue of veracity.

One is that there is an army of people doing the same thing and the chances of an information gap being discovered by you are vanishingly small.

Secondly, accounts being published now refer to 2022. At the beginning of that year the world was a very different place, world in lockdown and no war in Europe. Investing is about what happens next, not what happened, 16 months ago.

No one knows what will happen next so invest accordingly.

To a point I agree, but broad trends can still be spotted and do often repeat, the key for me was not to fixate on the last 12 months compared with the prior 12 months but maybe look at trends over much longer periods (say 5 years), if I could be bothered (and the older I have become the lest bothered I have become with wading through accounts)

This often meant holding annual accounts in a folder covering multiple years (you used to be able to order past quoted accounts), wading through and creating excel summaries and devoting lots of time and work to your creations.

Given the sums I was investing back then applying such effort to a "maybe" investment of say £15-£20k was frankly disproportionate (life was too short) so I gave up and moved to the Dark Side (Investment Trusts) and apart from some smaller forays( barely researched punts) into individual shares ( right now circa 27% of funds in Shell/Unilever/BHP/BAT/IMP/Smith (DS)/L & G/HSBC/Bellway/Springfield) I am now pretty happy to just buy ITS and virtually forget about them and just observe the dividends. (They also, longer term, and in the round, tend to do better than my punts)

That's just an expensive and inefficient way to buy the market.

[Dicky99]

Hello you very pleasant and amazing individuals, i do hope you are doing well today and you are happy.

I was kindly wondering please when analysing a 10-K a companies annual account information, i am just trying to formulate a checklist of what things would be classed as a positive and what you would perceive as something negative. What would be some examples you would make a note of that are positive to make an investment decision please and other examples of things you would perceive as negative and against investing please? Further once you get confident reading annual reports, can you skip to areas please you feel would be most relevant rather than reading all the contents? If anyone kindly had any thoughts on this i would be very grateful and thankful, it would mean the world to me.

Hope you have a pleasant day and look after yourself. Thank you very much for any support you can give.

If you want to learn about the basics of fundamental analysis of stocks from scratch you could do worse than go on Youtube and look for Buffetbooks.com. about 25no. 15minute lessons covering all aspects of investing including delving into the company accounts and calculating intrinsic value etc.