HAVE YOU EVER WATCHED PEOPLE WHO REALLY KNOW WHAT they’re doing pore over a set of financial statements? We’re thinking of savvy investors, smart lenders, sophisticated business owners, and financial executives. They spread the papers out in front of them. They go back and forth from the income statement to the balance sheet to the cash-flow statement. (If there isn’t a cash-flow statement, you can be sure they’ll request one.) They ask for more information—last year’s data, the year before that, even the year before that—and they start making trend charts. Pretty soon they begin asking all
...more
