What are the most important stats for evaluating a company? Also is only looking at things on yahoo finance too lazy? Should an investor be more involved?

Been thinking of going over files on sec.gov, but there seems to be a lot of boring stuff that I don’t fully understand.

Mostly I care about cash flow, debt, and market cap but I could probably do better.

Depends on the company.

The market is evolving.

But you can always fall back to basics like price/earnings-to-growth (PEG) ratio.

You're already looking at some of the better things, like debt/cash flow/mc. Understanding the differences between one companies debt and another is important though.

I think it's more interesting, what specifically are you looking at with debt?

Hey all:

I think it is impossible to find the single most important metric....and it will vary from company to company, industry, and such.

HOWEVER, there are certain things that are universally important. How much revenue is behind each share? P/S ratio

How much earnings is there? P/E ratio

How much cash flow is there in relation to debt? EV/EBIDTA ratio. This is certainly one of the most important metrics there is. Not much good in buying a company with a low P/E ratio IF it mired in tons & tons of debt.

Dividend yield is another important figure. Like Sir Mix a Lot, I like mine THICK. Of course, not much good in getting a huge dividend if it not sustainable.

So I like to buy companies that are trading for low single digit P/E's without a lot of debt and pay big dividends. I have had success over the long haul following that.

EV/EBITDA continues to be the gold standard it doesn’t deserve to be, at least theoretically.

Yes.

I dont understand how someone can buy individual stocks without at a minimum reading the annual report on EDGAR. and thats really a minimum.

While Yahoo! is certainly a good place to start, the annual & quarterly are absolutely critical.

This is especially the case on micro-cap stocks. A lot of the stuff I own has outdate/incorrect Yahoo! stats.

There have also been times where Yahoo! does not correctly list dividend. This does not happen often, but it has happened with stuff I own several times over the years. Sometimes, this can lead to a very good trading opportunity.

Yahoo! is also sometimes "slow" on updating statistics of companies. If you are on top of things, this can lead to a good trade. For example, Yahoo! lists a company as losing money...it shows up on stock screens as losing money, but you get the quarterlies & annual, read it ASAP and realize that NOW the company is actually making money....buy it before it shows up on the screens as being profitable.

Revenue growth, margins, ebitda, check the balance sheet.

The important is the direction of the size of the moat.

OP, you haven't mentioned your goals and time frames... retirement savings or not. taxable or not........ basically if your trading is taxable income, watch short-term capital gains tax (or same with dividend)

are you short-term trader? or medium-long term trying to soundly beat S&P 500?

basically, there is value metrics, growth metrics and momentum metrics... you want some combo of these.

I also think you want to do basic check where you only play stocks from S&P 500 or Russell 3000... something that has implicitly been vetted for basic quality.. and if you go outside this, plz look up revenue, earnings, value ratio. maybe sure it's not pump-and-dump

MOATS are great concept... I do find the term/idea is applied far too liberally.. most successful companies have decent MOATS. but is the MOAT real? MOAT has to be more than very big company, large customer base and some degree of technicality to business.

I was reading about MOATS the other day.. what is apple's moat? customers love it. and large user base..... but BlackBerry had a much better moat than Apple has now. Blackberry had the huge user base, the popularity with mission-critical users (over starting but use for important business tasks) and the powerful and unique encryption technology... and of course, Apple beat it with 1) touchscreen, 2) cool hipster image... Blackberry had (in my opinion) a great moat but now it's almost gone.

I read the book Rule #1 by Phil Town. I like the idea of vetting stocks with ROIC. I can get 10 years worth of ROIC on Morningstar under "Operating Performance" tab.

With debt I look at long term debt on the balance sheet and divide it by free cash flow. I turn it to red on an excel spread sheet if it exceeds a value of 3 in order to indicate it as a red flag. I also glance at the current ratio just to get another rough idea.

I'll have to look into EV/EBITDA again. I saw this dude on Youtube named Jimmy that explained it in a simple way that made sense. I'll have to rewatch that at some point.

From what I've read, technology companies struggle harder to keep their moat since it is an industry of disruption. I think they still have moats albeit, weaker ones. When people use Apple products a lot, they kind of get locked into using them since all of their equipment is Apple compatible and they understand how it works. It isn't easy to switch over to android or pc because it is new software and hardware. If you already have an apple charger it makes a lot of sense to get an Apple phone.

I personally own an iPhone7 and it does what I need. This may sound dumb, but I like the fact that the models go up numerically instead of having weird random letters at the end. Also, when you open Apple products, the boxes that they come in make you feel like futuristic-royalty. I'm not sure why, but I feel as though Apple will lose its market share to Google and Microsoft over time.