11. Organisations measure their financial health in a
number of ways depending where they are in their
lifecycle:
• Burn rate – how fast they are going through money
invested in them
• Cash flow – are they getting in enough money
quickly enough to keep going and growing
• Profitability – how much money do they make for
investors
• Efficiency – how well are the businesses run
Financial health
12. What kind of news hooks
could come from this data?
14. Burn rate
Before businesses are profitable they ‘burn through’
cash reserves. The business is running at a loss. It
becomes bankrupt when it doesn’t have enough money
to pay for its liabilities. It is often expressed as a burn
rate:
• How much they are going through over time (month/
year)
• How much time they have left before going under /
needing additional funding
• In 1997, Apple was within 3 months of bankruptcy
16. Cashflow
Cash flow is not the same as profitability
• How much money does the company
have on hand to pay expenses
• Having too much business too quickly
can be bad
19. Profitability
You think that you would know how much
money you make? Businesses look at this
differently
• Measures of profitability that take out the
cost of business investment EBITA,
EBITDA – looks at operating profitability
• How do they book sales? When is a sale
a sale
• What are third-party expectations versus
reality – The Number – predicted EPS
24. Growth vs. value
• It used to be that the technology sector was full
of companies that were growth companies – an
expanding market and ever expanding horizons
• Most traditional technology businesses
(Microsoft, Oracle, IBM) are now value
businesses – steady income slow growth rate
26. More reading
• The Number: How the Drive
for Quarterly Earnings
Corrupted Wall Street and
Corporate America by Alex
Berenson
• The Economist guide to
Financial Markets by Marc
Levinson
• Reuters Glossary – really
good guide to financial and
business terms
27. Jargon buster
• EBITDA - earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation
and amortisation (which is a posh word for regular
payments to reduce debt like a mortgage)
• EBITA – similar to EBITDA without depreciation – both
are measures of a company’s earnings from ordinary
operations
• EPS – earnings per share
• Market captialisation – total value of a company’s
shares quoted on the stock market
• Credit rating – measure of a borrower’s creditworthiness
• Bull – someone who thinks an item or market will
increase in value
• Bear – the opposite of a bear
• Bond – corporate or government IOU – legal document
offers to pay back lender at a X interest rate for Y time
• Share – part ownership in a company and right o share
profits
• Share class – affects voting rights, order of payout, level
of payout
• VC / venture captialist – high risk investment in start-ups
or expansion of existing private companies
• Angel investor – provides backing for start-ups before
VC money
• Private equity - firms which invest pools of capital
raised from financial institutions in a wide range of
commercial projects managed by investment
professionals
28. Keeping on top of your client
Publicly listed clients
• Stocks.app on iPhone
• Yahoo! Finance
• Google Finance
29. About me
Amazon author page: amzn.to/1SeO5Il
LinkedIn page: linkedin.com/in/gedcarroll
About: renaissancechambara.jp/about
Blog: renaissancechambara.jp
Email address found here: scr.im/renaissance
Twitter account: @r_c
Sina Weibo: renaissancechambara
WeChat