Getting to know a company - How I do it

Hello there visitor.

Thank you for your interest in what I wish to share with you.

I will briefly cover how I familiarise myself with a company behind the share that I wish to own.

It won't be exhaustive, but will have plenty of pictures to accommodate those who are visual as well.

Let's get to it...

Visiting Sharenet I enter the share code or company name in the search input box and select the company from the list returned. These websites are dynamic and efficient.

Then it opens the page with all the summarised information about the company selected.

See the general share information that gives the share code and the industry it operates in, which in the current case is Engineering.

To visit the website I just click on the relevant option.

I then look for company information or about us and visit the different pages there.

Toggling the options on the left gives you details on the right.

As you can see, this is a duly registered company with a valid registration number 1966/002182/06 that can be verified with CIPC, which you can do for yourself.

The company has 2 divisions, namely; CEG and ESG

If you visit the Capital Equipment Group you will find information about who is at the helm and what group of companies are under this division.

I leave it up to you to consume the information and employ your comprehension skills.

The same can be done with the Engineering Solutions Group.

Back on sharenet, you can find summarised fundamentals of the business. You can see that the market capital for this company is over 672 million

Comparing it to other listed companies in the same industry, it shows up as the second largest, Master Drilling being the largest. I went to sharedata to get the list of companies in its sector as sharenet wants me to be a subscriber to see that information.

You can also use the historical performance graph to check how it has fared against the overall performance of the selected comparison index.

Against the sector it operates in, you can see that it has been under-performing since sometime in late 2014, early 2015

Against the Market Capital that I am comparing it, as can be verified on this site, which is SmallCap, it has also started under-performing somewhere around 2015.

Toggle between the Prices tabs to see things like spread, number of trades made, highs and lows, trade volumes, moves for different periods, including year to date. 

Yesterday, when the market closed, the spread was ((620-612)/620) 0.13%. %Move indicated the price increase from Thursday's close of R5.99, so the price grew by R0.21c, which is also shown there.

Since 2015, as per the Closing Prices tab, it has lost share price value of about 92%, meaning that if you entered the market at its peak in 2014, you have been losing share price value since. But if you have entered the market in the past month, you have gained in share price value by about 46%

So much information is available and can be analysed at your own pace, using the dictionary to help words and definitions outside your vocabulary.

Below are some historical performance ratios as well as dividend information. You can see there that I have highlighted unissued shares, these are shares that are authorised by the company but are not made available to be traded on the stock market.

If you don’t like reading, this is likely to seem like a nightmare, but you are not doing yourself a favour by choosing to stay ignorant. I hope you choose knowledge

You are however, doing a-charlatan-that-banks-on-your-ignorance-in-order-to-fleece-you with promises of unrealistic returns -- which you won’t be able to spot as you are unfamiliar with the realistic performances typical of an industry or a company operating within that industry -- the favour of making his or her defrauding of you easy.

Sharenet and sharedata are just some of the websites that give this information on local stocks, relatively for free. There are others you can discover for yourself through your preferred search engines.


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