BUSINESS COURSE GUIDES
SOM 210 Lab 3: Evaluate Company Investment Reports

The Lab 3 assignment is designed to introduce you to investment reports from major Wall Street brokerage firms. Investment reports are the most widely used source of quality investment information. By reviewing investment reports, your team will become familiar with how these reports are used to predict company financial performance.

• Locate investment reports about your company in the BCRC database.
• Analyze and select reports that predict the financial performance of your company.
• Post links to key investment reports in team work space.

• Wall Street investment firms (also know as brokerage houses) are financial services companies. Investment firms buy and sell stocks for financial institutions and individual investors. Leading firms include Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and Salomon Smith Barney.
• Investment firms employ skilled business professionals called securities analysts.  Analysts are investment experts - applying their expertise to evaluate company and industry performance. Analysts write investment reports to support a firm's brokers, money managers, and other decision makers. 
• Analysts have access to financial information that is unavailable elsewhere due to their direct contacts with senior corporate executives. The investment reports they compose are widely followed by investment professionals.
• Key Point: Investment reports predict a company's future financial performance.
  

Investment reports are listed under the Investment Reports tab at the top of Company Profile screen. Not all investment reports are created equal. Some are very brief. Others provide only financial data. Your team should select investment reports that include extensive analyst commentary or reports that contain senior executive interviews. Review several reports. Look for reports with section headings similar to these example: Opinion; Investment Conclusion, Highlights, Earnings Outlook, Key Points, Risks. 

1. Go to team work space and link to your company's profile page in the Business and Company Resource Center database. 
2. At the top of the Company Profile page, click on the Investment Reports tab to view current investment reports about your company.
3. The investment report results screen provides very brief information about the report - the report title, report date, and contributor (the firm that published the report).  Your team should review several reports to get a feel for the style, content, and format of investment reports. 
4. Select at least two investment reports to post in team work space. Select reports that provide analyst commentary about your company's performance or provide the transcript of an executive interview. Remember to exclude investment reports that provide only financial data. 
5. Copy the report URL. Move the pointer to the Address Box and highlight the URL (click left mouse button), then press <CTRL> C to copy.
6. Return to your team work space. Post the investment report URL into Team Work Space as follows:
   • Under "Add/Update Team Research URLs", select the NEW Button. 
   • {Cursor is now located in the Address Box}. Press <CTRL> V to paste the report URL into the Address Box.
   • Go to the Display Name box and carefully compose a citation to the investment report using this citation format as a model:
     
     Krutick, J.S. (2001, August 23). Allegheny Energy Inc. investment report.  New York: Salomon Smith Barney. Retrieved September 13, 2001 from the Business and Company Resource Center database.
     
     
7. Finally, select the SAVE button to save the URL and citation in your team work space. Make sure to check the citation for errors and to test the URL address.
8. After posting the URLs for the 2 investment reports, open a new document in Microsoft Word, and write a one-page report about the current financial trends of your company. This report should be double-spaced, using left and right margins of 1.25 inches, and top and bottom margins of 1 inch. The font for your report should be Times New Roman (12 point). At the very top of your file, list the name of the file on the first line, and Team members on the second line. These 2 lines should be placed against the right margin. The rest of your file should be placed against the left margin. When finished, save the document to a diskette in the A: drive. Then, using the Add Document option in team work space, add the Word file to team work space.