Search for a particular company, and then click on the link for “Ratio Comparisons” on the left side of the company information page. The ratios compare your company against its industry, sector, and the S&P 500.
Mergent Online
Mergent Online allows you to do an advanced search for companies with the same SIC or NAICS code and then create a comparison report. There are a number of different ratios that can be used as comparison criteria when creating this user-defined report. Alternatively, you can use the Competitors Tab in Mergent to build a list of companies and compare their ratios.
Use the Companies & Markets tab to first search for a company, then click “Reports” and choose the “Ratio Comparison Report” to get a company’s ratios compared to industry averages.
The Yahoo! Finance Industry Center is a free resource that has some excellent industry information, including performance ratios. The Industry Browser allows you to browse industries by performance rankings, including ROE, P/E ratio, market cap, price change, price to book value, profit margin, price to book value, long term debt, and more.
Performance ratios
Industry and company financial ratios help compare a company against other companies in an industry, or generally measure financial performance. Industry ratios are an aggregate measure of performance, often broken down by company size.
An ideal tool for measuring corporate performance, this authoritative resource allows managers and auditors to pick and choose the tools they need to best assess their organization's performance. Each formula includes a complete description, explanation of the calculation, an example, and cautions regarding its use. The cautions are of particular use, since they describe those elements of a measurement that can be modified to deliver misleading results, different measurements that may work better in certain situations, usage on a trend line basis, and which other measurements should be used to reinforce indicated results.
