Topic: You must write an Equity Research Report.
Although there is no universal format for any equity research report, some rules and contents are widely used and covered. Please refer to this document produced by the CFA Institute, here. Also, there are various Equity Research Reports available on the internet. Search for them and become familiar with the most common contents.
Select a company that you like. The only restriction is that you must select a company whose stock is traded in the stock market. Then: Go to yahoo finance, use the selected company’s ticker (examples: the ticker for Apple is AAPL, the ticker for Coca-Cola is KO, the ticker for Tesla is TSLA) in the search engine and access to the company’s profile. There, you find 11 pages you can browse, from ‘Summary’ to ‘Sustainability’. The data/information conveyed in these pages is the primary source of information for your project. Use it.
These are the aspects that you must include in your report:
1.Executive summary at the beginning of your report. An executive summary is a brief description of what the reader is about to read once he or she goes through your report. Again, there are many places where you can find information about how to write a good executive summary. Search for it in the CFA document (link provided above).
2. The company’s financial ratios. You should select the most relevant ones, and you should consider the ones that you have learned in the prerequisite course of Principles of Finance. Make sure that you present the financial ratios for the last 5 years (2022, 2021, 2020, 2019 and 2018)
3.You need to apply the following models/techniques in your work:
a)Dividend Discount Model (Gordon-Shapiro Model)
b)Multiples Valuation