Where can I find industry standards for financial ratios?
I’m not trying to be glib, but the answer is major vendors like: Bloomberg Thomson Financial Reuters Dow Jones Others These companies collect the data, put it into databases and then sell the information. There are many financial service companies that buy service from these data aggregators (e.g. stock brokers), who then republish the data. I get my information from Bloomberg. However, I don’t have the terminal right next to me and it costs US$24,000 to have one for a year. Less expensive solutions are to either do it yourself (the information is widely available, but is very time consuming) or go with a brokerage. I use E-Trade, which has a partnership with several brokerages to give me reports as well as an “in-house” peer comparison function. The only problem I have with E*Trade is that they tend to lump in lots of things that aren’t comparable, the system is not flexible and it’s only based on US-listed companies. Bloomberg is by far the best.
