Hello!

Now that we've dipped our hands into understanding and planning for CI activities, we can start moving into actual research on company information.

This course is a little bit different in scope from a due diligence course, so what we will be focusing on is going to be the external sources of information about the companies we're dealing with. My plan over the next 2.5 weeks is to dive into several of the sources we're going to use to find company information and market information.

This week, we'll be looking into company information. I've attached 3 articles for you to read for this week. One is a long article on Company Information in general. The other two are short: One an overview of EDGAR and the other a cheat-sheet for reading an annual report.

Next week, we'll be moving into market- and industry-level research, which has a different set of resources. There will be reading on Top Hat for that material (as soon as I finish editing it).

There's going to be a company research exercise this week after Wednesday's class and a market research exercise next week. Then, I will assign the major research project, which is going to be assembling the virtual "black book" for a merger.

Goals and Objectives for this Unit:

Demonstrate ability to navigate and retrieve company information from public data sources
Demonstrate ability to navigate and retrieve company information from commercial data sources
Demonstrate ability to conduct market research on a given locality
Demonstrate ability to conduct research at the industry level