Belinda and James have a self-managed super fund. They are thinking of purchasing some Commonwealth Bank shares (CBA) to include in their super fund. Belinda and James emailed you asking if you can provide some information on CBA so they can make a decision as to whether or not they will go ahead with the purchase of the CBA shares. You agree to conduct some research and provide answers to their questions in readiness for your meeting with them scheduled for next Monday.
Note: In many instances your dealer group (or licensee) can provide you with access to research houses such as Lonsec, Morningstar etc where this information can be found easily. However, clients don’t have access to this, so if you know how to access public information, you can always show clients how to do it themselves.
We have provided you with step by step instructions about how to use finance.yahoo.com to access this information. The instructions relate to Woolworths but you are required to follow the same steps to access information about CBA.
Follow the detailed instructions provided at the end of this assessment activity in order to complete the following tasks:
Instructions for Research Project: Yahoo Finance
These instructions show you how to access:
- financial statements
- charts showing share price history
- an excel spreadsheet showing share prices and trades volume over time
- analysts’ comments
Please use the following instructions to complete this project for CBA. (These instructions access data for Woolworths. You are required to follow the same instructions but access data for CBA.)
1. INTRODUCTION
1. Go to the homepage by entering au.finance.yahoo.com
2. On the homepage enter the firm’s name in the Quote Lookup box which is on the right hand side of the screen. Enter the code WOW for Woolworth’s and you will be given a list. For shares on the Australian stock market, the code will be followed by .AX.
3. When we select WOW.AX the Summary for the share will appear.
The bar below the price shows different tabs with information about the share that has been selected.
The summary shows the current pricing of the share.
The statistics tab shows details of valuation measures and trading information
From the financials tab, you can access the 3 types of financial statements for the last 4 periods.
The historical data displays historical prices and dividends.
2. FINANCIAL STATEMENTS
To obtain any of the 3 key Financial Statements just select the Financials tab and click the name of the one that you want.
3. CHARTS
On the Summary tab, if we click on the for WOW we obtain a graph of the actual share prices along with the trading volumes for these shares below it.
There are several options with this chart
Range: This varies from one day (1d) to the whole period for which we have data (max)
Area: We can have Bar, Line (as in this case) or Candle (where the length of the candles show the daily price range and the colour shows whether prices moved up or down that day).
Settings: We can show the actual values (Linear) or the Log values. Typically we use Log values when we are interested in growth rates because the slope of the line graph of log values is equal to the growth rate of the values of the share prices.
We can also compare the Woolworth’s share prices to other values such as the S&P500, NASDAQ and Dow Jones, price indices. In the chart on the next page we see that this will give us the graphs of
thepercentage changes in the initial price or index value over the initial level. To compare WOW prices with the Dow index we select and choose the symbol we want
We can also compare our selected share with other shares by entering their 3 letter code in the Compare symbol box.
4. DOWNLOADING SHARE PRICES AND VOLUMES
Suppose we go to the main quote page and click Historical data. Here we see that we can choose between Daily, Weekly and monthly frequencies for WOW prices and trading volumes. We will start with the Weekly prices which are shown below. As you can see Yahoo Finance always starts with the value for the most recent date and then shows the values from earlier periods.
Or, we can choose to show dividends only. Each time you change your selection criteria you should click the Apply button to refresh the screen.
We can also download the data by selecting which is beneath the Apply button. This will download your data selection as a .csv file.
Using Excel on your computer, open this csv file. It contains a worksheet called table in which there are the following 7 columns:
Date contains the dates starting at the most recent one
Open, High, Low, Close & Adj Close contain the Opening, High, Low, Closing, and Adjusted Closing Prices for each week
Volume contains the Average of the Trading Volumes for the 5 days in that week
Save this file as a standard Excel file (rather than as a csv file)
To arrange these values starting with the earliest rather than with the most recent we highlight all 7 columns and click
Data / Sort
The Sort dialog box will now appear. In the Sort by box click Date, then in the Order box click Oldest to Newest. You will have the worksheet shown below. You should now save this sorted Excel file to your computer.
5. LOOKING AT ANALYSTS COMMENTS ON WOW
If we click on the Analysts tab and scroll down, on the right hand side we can see the recommendation trends and the recommendation rating. For the month of December most analysts believe that Woolworths is underperforming.
