FIN 3403 Online Module 1

Online Module Title: Financial Statements

Activity: Web search
Assignment: Complete the Module 1 Quiz online
Chapter/Topic:
Learning outcomes:

Chapter 3: Understanding Financial Statements

Develop ability to interpret financial statements.
Develop familiarity with financial websites.

This exercise involves reviewing the financial statements for several companies, using
both Yahoo Finance and EDGAR. It includes finding economic data from the Securities
Exchange Commission (SEC). The information will be used to complete a short quiz.

In this online module, you will visit a variety of financial websites and take a short
Webcourses quiz. The purpose of the exercise is to familiarize you with the types of
financial information available on the web.
The Webcourses quiz is titled Module 1 Quiz. Ive set the quiz so that you can take it
as many times as you want, and you can take the quiz for as long as you like on each
attempt.
Now, let visit a few sites on the web. From each site, there will be a few questions on
the quiz.
The first site:

If you ctrl+click on the words above (or go to http://finance.yahoo.com), it will open the
site. Do that now. As you can see, this website has a lot of information, including
company reports, market summaries, and personal finance. This is a great site for both
general financial questions as well as company-specific information.
Lets look at a company: VeriSign. VeriSign started with the Internet boom, and is one
of the survivors. To get to this companys information, type its ticker symbol (VRSN) in
the Quote Lookup box near the top of the window, and click on go.
Note the links along the left side of the window: Summary, Order Book, Options,
Historical Prices, etc. You will need to visit these to find information for the quiz. I
wont tell you which ones to visit you will discover this as you proceed through the
quiz. You will see that this is a great site to use for general information about financial
markets and companies.
The next site we will visit is the Securities and Exchange Commission. When a company
decides to become a public company, there are a variety of documents they must file.
Lets look at one in particular.
First, just go to the SECs homepage: http://www.sec.gov. As you can see, the site
includes a lot of information for investors, primarily to assist with investor protection.
Now, lets look at a particular filing with the SEC. There is a search function to find
specific forms. We are going to access a document filed by Google when they went
public in 2005. It is here:
http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312505186870/d424b3.htm

This document is known as a prospectus. Companies must file these with the SEC
anytime they want to issue new securities to the general public. Filing a prospectus
allows Googles executives to tell you what the company is about, and any other
information they think you need to know before investing in Google.
You will use this document to find information for the quiz.
Finally, lets visit the site for one of the Federal Reserve Banks. As you know, the
Federal Reserve System is the central bank of the United States. Its mission (originally)
was to provide the nation with a safer, more flexible, and more stable monetary and
financial system 1. Of course, it has taken on other roles since its original charter back
in 1913.
We are going to look at financial data collected by the Fed. Go to the following site:
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/
This site is the storehouse for most of the public data that the Fed produces. As with
the last two sites, you will use this site to find information for the quiz.

http://www.federalreserve.gov/generalinfo/mission/default.htm