• Why is Financial Analysis So Confusing?

    Feel like you are running in circles?

    Why does analyzing any financial data take much longer than you wanted?

    You follow one rabbit hole researching profitability, only to find yourself spending hours more reviewing a company’s trail of debt…yet another (and deeper) rabbit hole!

    Well, you’re not alone.

    The very broad topic of financial analysis can easily overwhelm us mere mortals, unless you keep one thing as a goal in your mind.

    Do you know what that one thing is?

    Without it, you risk running in circles and following rabbit holes that may lead to nowhere.

    (I’ll tell you what that one thing is at the end of this post).

    My name is Dale, and I’m probably a lot like you. I had finance classes in school.  I watch snippets of financial news on TV and catch relevant web news articles.

    Do I feel like a financial expert?

    No.  Far from it.

    I have more books about financial analysis than I’d like to admit, and I thought I was way ahead of the curve in the mid-late 1990’s when The Motley Fool arrived online and I started following their advice.

    Yet when I needed to do some hard financial research, I’d end up searching the Internet for the same things again and again.

    I just wanted one place where I refresh my memory on the things where I always seem to be wasting my day searching.

    So, I created Financial Analysis Hub originally as a place to keep my own notes on financial analysis topics (it was called something else).   Financial terms and concepts, ratio explanations, and small calculators to act as a single place I can turn to when I needed resources like this.  Later one day, I was accessing my website logs and noticed hundreds of people were visiting my site daily, and were searching for the same topics I had written about.

    I was stunned.

    Other people were looking for the same thing!

    To make a long story short, I built up the Financial Analysis Hub website and made it easier to find financial ratio explanations, along with making sure all the calculators worked.  I hope I’m able to save you time and energy by not having to dig up all these obscure financial ratio analysis topics from all over the Internet.

    I get emails from time to time from website visitors, and I’d like hear more of what frustrates you.  If you are too busy to email me, just tweet below and it will go to our Twitter page.  We watch that thing closely:

    Tweet your number one frustration with financial analysis:


    I almost forgot!

    What’s that one thing you need to keep in mind as you dive into financial analysis?

    The answer is clarity.

    Before you start to do any really hard financial work, it helps tremendously to make a couple notes about  exactly what it is you are trying to accomplish. What you are working on is just about as important as what you should not be working on, and doing any analysis (financial or otherwise) can lead you far down the wrong rabbit hole before you realize.

    Thanks for reading!

     

     

    Continue reading →

Older Posts: