How To Read An Annual Report (10-K)

everyone and welcome back to the channel in today's video we're going to be going through how to read an annual report or a 10k as the annual report is called for US businesses so this is a question that I've been getting a lot recently and I thought it was about time that I made a video on this and show you exactly how I go through and read annual report because as a long-term investor as someone who is analyzing the fundamentals of a business a big part of that is to read annual reports and not just

to read one annual report but to read many annual reports over many different years for a particular company and then also reading the annual reports of competing businesses in the same industry so I wanted to break down how I go through this do I just read an annual report from page one to 180 or however many pages it has or are there certain sections that I focus more on and some sections that I don't really look at too much so that is what we're going to go through in today's video and as always if you

do enjoy it I would very much appreciate it if you could leave a like hit subscribe if you want to see more and of course as always let me know your thoughts down in the comment section below so to make this video a little bit more valuable and easier to understand we're actually going to head over to my computer and I'm going to walk you through a real-life example of an annual report and talk about each of the sections while I'm showing it to you on screen so that's a little bit easier for you to

understand so the company that I'm going to be using as an example in this video is Texas Roadhouse and there's no particular reason why I've chosen Texas Roadhouse except for the fact that it is quite a simple business model so it's going to be easy for me to show you each of the components for those who don't know Texas Roadhouse is a casual dining restaurant chain in the United States so without further ado let's jump over to my laptop and get started at breaking down the major components of an annual report that you should be

looking at when you're analyzing a business all right so just before we get into the actual annual report for those who are unaware this is how you go out and find the annual reports for any company that you're looking for the first thing you want to do is head over to and search the company name along with investor relations and then you will see that there is an investor relations page for the public company that you're looking at so let's head into the Investor Relations page for Texas Roadhouse in this particular example and you can

see here via the drop-down menu we can see there's annual reports here sometimes the company won't have an annual reports page they might just have the SEC filings page particularly if it's a US company so the other way that you can find it if they don't have that is to head into the SEC filings click annual filings and you'll be able to find the Form 10-k is the filing type for an annual report so let's download that in PDF form and here it is so the first thing you'll notice is there's a bit of a

legal homepage kind of thing here first page and then we have a table of contents and there are a lot of different sections in an annual report but I'm just going to show you the ones that are most important to focus on and I'm going to talk about what I'm looking for in each as well as how much time I'm spending looking at each of these sections so the first section you will notice once you scroll down out of the table of contents is a section called business and this will almost always be item 1

it'll be the first thing in the annual report and basically this section includes all information about how the business makes money what it spends money on maybe it's marketing strategies where it sources its materials from the distribution process and any major competitors that it might have it's basically all of the information about the particular business so in this example for this restaurant company we can see that we've got a description of the business which includes how many restaurants they have open how many of those restaurants are Texas Roadhouse branded and how many are branded as

Bubba's 33 a different type of restaurant we can see that they explain what Texas Roadhouse restaurants are here they also explain what Bubba's 33 s are they have a writing strategy so what is their aim at providing the best service that's all written in there they describe how much it costs this is an interesting one for restaurant businesses how much it approximately costs to open a new restaurant which at the moment is about 5.2 million dollars so that's really valuable for us to know how much does it cost for them to open a new restaurant

we can compare that to how much revenue or profit is being generated out of each of those restaurants and we can get a better insight of the return that they're generating on their investments so this is why I picked a restaurant business to show as an example because it's easy for me to explain how this is applicable to estimating the future cash flows of a business which is ultimately what we're trying to do but you can see they talk about how they select sites so how do they select the locations for their new restaurants all

of the different types all of the different places that they have restaurants they have eight in Alabama Illinois they've 15 and so on and so forth they talk about their food where they source it from what their standards are for food their service people which would be their employees their marketing strategy their restaurant franchise arrangements so any franchise setups that they have what are the arrangements of that what revenue do they get out of that what royalties and that sort of thing and then we've got as I mentioned competition trademarks and government regulation and seasonality

so just bits and pieces about the main components of the business the number of employees sixty four thousand nine hundred employees and then of course some of the major executive offices some of the major directors and managers who are running the company and a little bit of information about them but that basically completes the first section of the annual report and that is a section that you want to read at least once so if you're analyzing a particular company you don't need to read this section for the past ten years of annual reports because for

the most part it's going to be very similar now businesses do change their operations over a 10-year period so it's important to understand what those changes are but for the most part I'm going to be reading this section in full for the latest annual report and making sure that I understand all of the different components of the business and how it operates and then I'll glance over this for the other ten years of financial reports going back 10 years because that's what I like to look at I won't read it completely but I'll have a

glance to see for example with this restaurant business I would say okay how many restaurants did they have five years ago did they have above 33 five years ago or is that a new thing that's come up recently so really I read one in depth for this section and then I glanced over the other years of financial reports and then the second section that we've got here that's important to look at is what's called risk factors and this is a section where management describes all of the risks that are associated with an investment so this

is super important it's so important that you read and understand all of these risk factors as these are the things that are going to prevent your company from providing you the return that you want obviously when you make an investment you have certain expectations about what the company is going to do in the future and certain achievements that they're going to meet certain revenue goals and certain cash flow goals these risks are the things that would prevent your investment from generating you a high return so you need to make sure you read through all of

them and you need to understand all of them and again this is something you really only need to read in one annual report thoroughly it's not going to change dramatically from year to year when you're looking at past annual reports now once you've gone through the risk factors section there's some more really not important information here as some stuff about shares and how the stock price has moved over the past five years that's really not relevant to us at all at this point in our analysis the next major section you'll come across is this section

called selected financial data or in this case it's called selected consolidated financial data and I don't always read this section but it can be a good place to quickly source some of the raw data that we need for our spread so I always get my raw data from a website called quick FS dotnet however I always want to double-check that those numbers are accurate from the official financial statements so sometimes I will come in here and I'll have a glance and you can see we can see the total revenue that's one of our four key

numbers that we need to enter into the spreadsheet so I'll go ahead and grab all of those numbers and make sure they're correct and we can also grab diluted earnings per share from here as well and we can also grab shareholder equity so those numbers are all available here although it's not something that I focus on too much as the full financial statements take more of my intention and we'll talk about that when we get to it in this report but the next important section here is straight after the selected financial data and it is

management's discussion and analysis of financial condition and results of operations and this is arguably the most important part of the annual report I think it's the most important part and the reason why is because it tells us about what drove the success or failure of the business during the year it also tells us about how their performance compared to last year and even the year before that and it will often include sort of little snippets of what management's strategy is for growing the profits of the business in the future so this is super important I

will this this is the section that I will focus on the most in an annual report and I will read this section for many different years of annual reports so for Texas Roadhouse for example I'll read the 2019 version of management's discussion over a 2018 17 16 15 14 all the way back to 2010 to understand how management strategy has changed over that time and how has management been successful in achieving that and it also tells us about what the limitations of the business were what were the fact is that stop to them from growing

their revenue in the way that they expected what made their profitability or their margins go down a little bit during the period was it because there was higher labor costs for example and how often does that happen is that something that happens every five years for this kind of business or is it something that happens every two years and it's really a regular occurrence that margins are getting worse and worse so those are the kinds of things that I'm starting starting to think about when I'm reading through this management's discussion section the other thing to

mention in the discussion and analysis section is that this is a good place to start to get a grasp about what the key business indicators are so if you've been following the channel you would know that part of our analysis is that we need to identify the the unique indicators that tell us about the performance of this particular business in the industry there are specific numbers in each industry that are driving the performance of the business and for example in this texas roadhouse example we can say that within the discussion and analysis section they talk

about key measures we use to evaluate our company so these are the measures that management is using to determine whether or not they've been successful during a period or not and these are some of the key business indicators that I would focus on when I'm analyzing restaurant businesses as well for example number of restaurant openings how many stores do they open comparable restaurant sales growth what has the growth been in existing restaurants from year to year if we exclude the growth in sales that would come from opening new restaurants it's average unit volume how much

each restaurant is generating in sales and so on so forth so those kinds of things can be found also in the discussion and analysis section now if we scroll down past all of that discussion and analysis and a couple of other things that are not super important we get down to the official financial statements so these are the three well there's four financial statements but there's three that we focus on which are the income statement the balance sheet and the cash flow statement so here's the balance sheet we then have the income statement consolidated statement

of income and comprehensive income this is the statement of changing equity but we don't really need to worry about that too much and then we have the other one we care about which is the consolidated statement of cash flows and in these financial statements this is another good place to get all of our core numbers that we need for filling out the spreadsheet of course we need revenue which is on the income statement we need earnings per share again on the income statement we need equity which is on the balance sheet and then we need

cash flow for owners which is derived from numbers on the cash flow statement but cash flow for owners is a little bit more complicated if you want to learn more about that I'll leave a link to it down in the description below to a video that talks about it and then some of the other numbers we need we need debt numbers we need a long term debt when we're calculating the return on invested capital again in the spreadsheet and then of course we need total liabilities and short term liabilities and current assets all of those

things will be found on the balance sheet and we use those to assess the debt levels within the company now the section right below the financial statements is called notes to consolidated financial statements and this is really basically a definition of all of the terms that have been used in the financial statements such as receivables cash and cash equivalents we've got here inventory it basically describes what management means by all of these things and this is a section that I don't always read I don't read this in full some people choose to I choose not

to but what I will do is as I'm going through the management's discussion section and as I'm starting to interpret the financial statements and work out where is this revenue coming from what is this expense I will look through this section to see what the different definitions are for some of the things that are included in the financial statements I for example I might want to understand a little bit more about what the company is spending their marketing money on what specifically are they doing are they doing online marketing are they doing sponsorships are they

doing offline marketing billboards that sort of thing TV advertisements if I want to know a little bit more about that I can come in here and see what they're spending their marketing money on or any other kind of term that's being used such as revenue recognition how do they recognize revenue is it at the point of sale or is it some other time in the future but essentially this section is just really my glossary or my my my I guess dictionary for finding out more about certain terms that management is using and this definition section

or this notes to consolidated statements section really is most of the rest of the the report some of these get expanded really quite largely for example share based compensation usually takes up a big chunk when they're talking about all of the different kinds of shares that are compensated to management when the business performs in a certain way and it kind of just starts to drag out and as I said I don't read all of this in full it's just if I want more information about a particular thing if a question pops into my head and

I don't know the answer to it often I'll be able to find the answer in here another example could be if a company has quite a large amount of debt even though I probably wouldn't be interested in that company I might be interested in finding out when that debt is due what are the interest rates on that debt and what are the payments interest payments all of that sort of thing all of that information would be found in this section and then below that we have what's called an employment agreement and this is just a

bunch of legal jargon that does not matter you can see for for texas roadhouse it goes for about a hundred pages so this is just rubbish I don't particularly think there's anything in here that's worth reading if I'm wrong please let me know down in the comments section but I've never found any value in reading through this I think it's more of a time waster than anything but basically we've gone through everything that I that I've described we've we went through just to sort of summarize we had the business section at the top this first

section here business we have risk factors that we want to look at we then have selected financial data we have management's discussion and analysis of results and operations we then have the financial statements and then we have notes to those financial statements or the the definitions of of different terms used in those financial statements but that is basically how I go through and I read an annual report there's some major sections that I look at over and over and over again for many different years of annual reports from multiple years going back ten years there's

some sections I read just once such as the business section and their sections that I really don't read at all such as the notes to consolidated financial statements which I will only use when I need to find more information but I hope this video provided some value and if it did make sure you leave a like are very much appreciated if you can do that and let YouTube know that you did enjoy this content if you have any thoughts or comments let me know down in the comment section below and of course as always if

you're new around here and you want to see more content like this and you want to develop your understanding of stock analysis then the best thing you can do is hit subscribe hit the notification belt so you don't miss out on any of the notifications but for now I will see you guys in the next video