Value investing · Course 30 of 39 · Judging a business
Foreign companies listed here
Hundreds of US-listed companies file a 20-F, report under IFRS, or keep their books in yen. What changes about the filings, the ratios and the shares you own.
Every company in this course is listed in the United States and every one of them can be bought in dollars. What differs is the paperwork behind them, and the paperwork changes what you can read.
Six lessons. Who counts as a foreign private issuer and what qualifying changes. The 20-F, what it holds that a 10-K does not, and the calendar it runs on. The IFRS differences an investor actually meets, including one that removes a ratio entirely here. Currency, which is where a growth rate can be an exchange rate and where this product's own figures are refused rather than guessed. What an American depositary share actually is. And the control structures where the votes and the cash flows belong to different people.
Real filings throughout, named and dated. It assumes you can read an annual report and have met the common ratios.
The test, not the verdict
Foreign companies listed here is 6 lessons on the tests and where their lines sit. Whether a company you hold clears one of them is a separate question that needs its filings read, and nothing on these pages has read them.
Related
- How to read a 10-K is the document this course keeps comparing a foreign issuer's annual report against.
- What drives each multiple is where a ratio that silently mixes two currencies would do the most damage.
- Methodology is how a filing's own reported currency is read and converted here.
See our methodology for how the product reads a filing and what it refuses to compute.