Classic Wall Street investment methodology typically includes lots of financial ratio analysis that's intended to help investors to understand a company's quality and value. We've just launched the StockCentral.com Ratio Analyzer to broaden the investing tools available on our site, focusing on the key indicators that you can consider while studying a company.

What's truly unique about this tool is that not only calculates and displays the actual values for key liquidity, cash flow, profitability, assets, inventory, and effienciency ratios, but it also flags each value as being good, bad, or inconclusive, and it includes helpful text in plain English to help increase your insight. If you need more information, help text automatically appears when you roll your mouse over an item to give you further details. A printable User Guide is also available with still more background.

To access the Ratio Analyzer, click the Tools tab after you log into StockCentral, and then select the "ratio analyzer."

Any successful business owner is constantly evaluating the performance of his or her company, comparing it with the company's historical figures, with its industry competitors, and even with successful businesses from other industries. To complete a thorough examination of a company's effectiveness, however, one needs to look at more than just easily attainable numbers like sales, profits, and total assets. You must be able to read between the lines of financial statements and make the seemingly inconsequential numbers accessible and comprehensible. The objective of the Ratio Analyzer is to make this information most easily understandable.

The Ratio Analyzer is based on a spreadsheet originally developed by Bob Adams, and is primarily designed to analyze companies in manufacturing and retail industries. If used with other industries, some indicators, where data is missing, will need to be ignored.