FIN 3403 Online Module 1 Online Module Title: Financial Statements Activity: Web search Assignment: Complete the Module 1 Quiz online

Chapter/Topic: Chapter 3: Understanding Financial Statements Learning outcomes: 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 system1. 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.

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