ACE - Stock Selection Guide

Monitor's Quarterly Report on Individual Stocks

Helpful Hints: Quarterly Report

Most information needed for the quarterly report comes from Value Line reports, online sources, and your Stock Selection Guides (SSG). The heading material on the quarterly report is very similar to the heading material on the monthly report. It adds only one new item: Which Quarter? Fill in the first section just as you did in the monthly report

Obtain quarterly information from the most recent Value Line report or from the company's 10-Q report. The 10-Q report includes unaudited financial statements and provides a view of the company's financial position during the year. Due within 45 days of the close of the quarter, the form must be filed for each of the first three fiscal quarters. You can access the 10-Q report through http://www.edgar-online.com/brand/yahoo/search/?sym=____. Note: After the = sign, enter the ticker of the company's report you need. An example: To retrieve the 10-Q report for General Electric (ticker is GE) type in the following address: http://www.edgar-online.com/brand/yahoo/search/?sym=GE

1. The information needed to answer question 1 comes from your SSG and the Value Line report. You will need to use both the current SSG, the SSG from the previous quarter plus the current Value Line report and the Value Line report from the previous quarter. To calculate change in items such as total debt, insider ownership, and so on, you will have to compare figures from the current quarter's SSG against figures from last quarter's SSG.

A. Timeliness and Safety are both located in the upper left corner of Value Line.
B. Insider ownership (often presented as "officers and directors own. . .") is usually included in the narrative describing the business located directly under the historical data in Value Line. Unfortunately, this information is not always included. Because insiders know their company better than analysts do, insider buying and selling may predict good and bad times for the organization. Remember, however, that all executives will sell occasional stock when they need money to build a new house or send a child to school, so every insider sale is not necessarily a sign that the company has fallen on bad times. This information is recorded on your SSG under the Capitalization Section. Insider ownership figures are also available at Quicken.com.
C. The percentage of Institutional Ownership is found on the SSG under the Capitalization Section. You can hand calculate Institutional Ownership figures from the Institutional Decisions box in the upper left hand corner of Value Line (divide the total number of common shares owned by institutions by the total number of common shares outstanding), or you can get this information online (http://quicken.excite.com/investments/quotes). Institutional ownership is listed in Share Information under the category Fundamentals shown on the left side of the screen. When the number of institutional owners rises above 40%, the price of the stock may fall faster during recessions or other periods of uncertainty because institutional owners trade in large blocks of stock, a fact which causes significant price gyrations. If the number of institutional owners falls dramatically, on the other hand, you will want to investigate to see what has caused the stock to fall out of favor.
D. Total Debt ($M) and percent of Debt to Total Capitalization are shown on your SSG under the Capitalization Section on the front side of the SSG. You will find the Long Term Debt to Total Capitalization percentage in the box labeled Capital Structure on the left side of Value Line.
E. The judgment information comes from your current Stock Selection Guide.

2. Growth statistics for sales and earnings for the quarter are located in the lower left of Value Line or the upper left section of the Stock Selection Guide.