News / Bog
What is Debt??? Or: In Defence of the Fitch Approach on how to treat Leasing Liabilities
In a very interesting article about the analytical state of the new lease accounting under US-GAAP and IFRS, the always brilliant Footnote Analyst (HERE) showed recently amongst others that the big…
Coronavirus: A brief Fundamental Analysis Manual for Equity Investors
The new Coronavirus (Covid-19) is roiling the stock markets. The virus changes the fundamental outlook for many business models and simultaneously brings a lot of uncertainty about the concrete…
Little Swindles in the Dark? How Earnings per Share are calculated in Practice
It is reporting season these weeks! Best time for a little numbers game (for another recent numbers game see our post on how to detect fraud using Benford’s frequency-of-digits rule HERE). Today’s…
Northgate’s Depreciation Game – The “Fixed Assets become Inventories” Financial Analysis Problem
Northgate Group Plc. is UK’s biggest provider of light commercial vehicle rental services, with operations in UK, Spain and Ireland. Its business model is relatively straightforward. The company…
Diageo’s Liquor Business – The Maturing Inventory Financial Analysis Problem
Sometimes inventory is a pure pass-through, such as for typical trade businesses. Sometimes it is developed and transformed via work conducted within the firm into a final product, such as for…
Continental’s Mix Effects: Another Segment Reporting Financial Analysis Problem
In the past, we already shed some light on the problems of reading the appropriate information from segment reportings of companies, but more in a general way (LINK). This time we provide a concrete…
Telefonica DE’s OIBDA growth rates: Another Non-GAAP Financial Analysis Problem
Telefonica Deutschland (TEF DE) is a German based telecommunication company and network operator. It serves roughly 50 mio customers, most of them with a mobile contract. The company engaged in a…
NMC Health: Demystifying Reverse Factoring: The “Three-is-a-Crowd” Financial Analysis Problem
Abengoa S.A. (now bust) applied this technique heavily, Carrillion plc (now bust, see LINK to our former blog post [only in German]) too… and recently short seller Muddy Waters seemed to have it…
Cyan’s I-New acquisition: The Badwill Financial Analysis Problem
In 2018, Cyan AG, a provider of network-integrated security solutions, acquired 100% of I-New Unified Solutions AG from Austrian gambling company Novomatic AG, in a two-step approach. The acquisition…
Stepping Up and Down the Value Ladder – The “Pars-pro-Toto” Financial Analysis Problem
In one of his latest posts, Aswath Damodaran put his fingers on a quite interesting side-effect of the well-known Softbank/WeWork story. Could it be that Softbank simply bought into the struggling…