SP — A computer program for fundamental analysis of stocks

Fundamental analysis, a part of investment analysis, is long-term oriented and primarily focused on analyzing factors such as economic influences, industry factors, and especially company information such as product demand, earnings, dividends and management, in order to determine an intrinsic value for the company's stocks. Based on this analysis, security analysts, investors and also students can make prudent investment decisions by comparing this value with the current market price of the stock. To analyze the pros and cons of fundamental analysis in this article an educational computer program called SP will be presented, which calculates on the basis of companies balance sheet and income statement data provided by Standard and Poor's several important ratios. Among these ratios, are up and down beta factor, price-earnings ratio, dividend yield, debt-equity ratio etc. Taking into account a lot of data from the Standard and Poor's database the program enables users to calculate new and even different ratios which do not exist in the original database and are important for investment decisions. The goal of such an approach for students is to simulate different investment strategies based on fundamental analysis, by picking specific stocks which meet their investment criteria, tracking their performance for a predefined investment period and analyzing the results. Doing so they are better prepared for "real life" investments in the mature stock markets and especially in the more volatile emerging stock markets.