To better understand a company, its performance in the market and the factors that affect it, you need to understand the whole picture of that universe. This includes :
While you should certainly look at the company’s website, note that will only help you gain insight into that company's opinion about itself. For other opinions about a company’s issues and performance, there are several types of library databases that will help. They are generally divided up by the type of information they contain although there are some exceptions such as Hoovers, which gathers several different types of information by company name .
Using the company stock symbol helps you find consistent company analysis from resource to resource by making sure you are comparing the same company, and not any subsidiaries.
You can access the current list of Fortune 500 companies via the Fortune website.
Hoover's
Contains company profiles, analyst reports, SWOTs, and market research reports under the NAICS code link..
Example of SWOT analysis from Hoover's:
CRUSH Reports are available for Fortune 1000 companies and focus on IT architectures, business and technology initiatives, organizational charts, corporate strategies, budgets, and key decision maker contact information. You can access a CRUSH report from the left hand menu of a company overview page.
Company chronologies, company histories, journals, market research reports, market share reports, rankings, recent news, SWOT reports, videos, industry information. Comparison chart tool.
Covers most business areas: management, marketing, economics, finance, accounting, & international business. Includes company reports, SWOT analyses, working papers, country reports, industry reports, case studies, etc.
Source of financial and economic data, news, and information. Provides access to analyst reports and select SDC data from the M&A section. Users must register for a personal account, which will be reset each semester. It is available to authorized users from Vanderbilt University for non-commercial, academic research. Download limit for analyst reports and pdf documents of 150 pages per day, reset daily at midnight local time. Download limits for SDC data of 199 rows of excel data per day. Download limits for other types of data may apply.