A wide range of valuable financial information is avail- able on the Web. With just a couple of clicks, an investor can easily find the key financial statements for most pub- licly traded companies. Here’s a partial (by no means a complete) list of places you can go to get started.

- One of the very best sources of financial in- formation is Thomson Financial. Go to the textbook’s Web site and follow the directions to access Thomson ONE—Business School Edition. An especially useful feature is the ability to download up to 10 years of financial statements in spreadsheet form. First, enter the ticker for a company and click Go. From the top tab (in dark blue), select Financials. This will show a second row of items (in light blue). Selecting More from this row will re- veal a drop-down menu. Select SEC Database Reports & Charts. This will bring up another drop-down menu that includes the 10-year balance sheets, income statements, and statement of cash flows. To download the financial statements into a spreadsheet, first select one of the statements, such as the 10YR Balance Sheet. The balance sheets will then be displayed on your browser page. To download, click on the Excel icon toward the right of the light blue row at the top of the Thomson ONE panel. This will bring up a dialog box that lets you download the Excel file to your computer.

- Try Yahoo! Finance’s Web site, http://finance .yahoo.com. Here you will find updated mar- ket information along with links to a variety of interesting research sites. Enter a stock’s ticker symbol, click GO, and you will see the stock’s current price along with recent news about the company. The panel on the left has links to key statistics and to the company’s income statement, balance sheet, statement of cash flows, and more. The Web site also has a list of insider transactions, so you can tell if a company’s CEO and other key insiders are buying or selling their company’s stock. In addition, there is a message board where in- vestors share opinions about the company, and there is a link to the company’s filings with the SEC. Note that, in most cases, a more complete list of the SEC filings can be found at http://www.sec.gov.

• ◆  Other sources for up-to-date market infor- mation are http://money.cnn.com and http://www.zacks.com. These sites also provide financial statements in standardized formats.

• ◆  Both http://www.bloomberg.com and http://www.marketwatch.com have areas where you can obtain stock quotes along with company financials, links to Wall Street research, and links to SEC filings.

• ◆  If you are looking for charts of key account- ing variables (for example, sales, inventory, depreciation and amortization, and reported earnings) as well as financial statements, take a look at http://www.smartmoney.com.

• ◆  Another good place to look is http://www .investor.reuters.com. Here you can find links to analysts’ research reports along with the key financial statements.

• ◆  Zacks (already mentioned) and http://www .hoovers.com have free research available along with more detailed information pro- vided to subscribers.

  In addition to this information, you may be looking for sites that provide opinions regarding the direction of the overall market and views regarding individual stocks. Two popular sites in this category are The Mot- ley Fool’s Web site, http://www.fool.com, and the Web site for The Street.com, http://www.thestreet.com.