Company Profile Tool Provides Insight Into a Stock's Value

You may think it's a no-brainer. You're only going to put on a directional trade if you've got a hunch a stock's going to move in a particular direction, right? But to make that decision involved more than just guessing. You may have to look for things like what drives a stock's value or price forecasts.

The Company Profile tool in the thinkorswim^® platform by TD Ameritrade may help you as a trader drill down into the data and create your own short-term, "what-if" scenarios.

The company profile tool can help you uncover what drives a company's value, test different scenarios and help inform your trading decisions.

1. What drives the stock? That's what you'll see first. It's an interactive diagram of the revenue generating divisions of the company. Each division is represented as percent of market cap.
2. Click on a division to view available forecasts related to it.
3. Forecasts are displayed separately for each sub-division.
4. When you click on a forecast it'll display a plot of the value you're analyzing. Its timespan normally includes five years before and seven years after the current date.
5. You can modify the forecasts, which may affect the division diagram and estimated price. Compare your estimated price with the Trefis estimate and/or current market price to see if the has overvalued or undervalued the security compared on your projection.
   

“It can be challenging to derive the effects of a company’s business units on its valuation if all you have available are news articles and regulatory filings," says Chesley Spencer, Trading Product Manager, TD Ameritrade. "The Company Profile can greatly simplify that process by modeling directly the effect of different business lines to a company’s bottom line.”

Access Company Profile

For your convenience there are several ways you can access the Company Profile tool. Just log in to the thinkorswim^® platform and select Company Profile from either the trade tab, Analyze tab, or the View the News gadget.