It Pays to Read the Boring Stuff

About the Book

Corporate financial statements, and the Management Discussion & Analysis statements that accompany them, are among the most boring documents in the world. Yet they also contain information that is of vital importance to the individual investor. This book teaches you how to read these statements and extract this information. Many once popular companies, such as JDS Uniphase, Nortel, Air Canada and Bombardier were sending out warning signals of their impending doom in their financial statements as much as two or three years before their collapse. Investors who knew where to look could have avoided disaster by selling before the price collapse, or, better yet, not buying at all.

This book focuses on Canadian companies and uses Canadian accounting rules and statements, but the concepts discussed are relevant to the U.S. scene as well. While it may not help you avoid cases of outright fraud, such as Enron, it should help you to find the warnings of potential disaster that are often hidden in plain sight in the publicly available financial information put out by all publicly traded companies.

About the Author

T. Edward Gardiner has a B. Com. degree from McGill University and an MBA from Concordia University. He spent 26 years working for Bell Canada and a related company in many different departments, including: Finance, Regulatory Matters, Engineering Economics, Rates, and Corporate Development. During his career he was involved in negotiating several major strategic alliances. As part of the due diligence process for these, he gained an in depth knowledge of corporate financial statements and Management Discussion & Analysis Statements. He has also been involved in writing and/or editing selected parts of such statements himself. He also has a thorough knowledge of government regulation and Intellectual Property management.

Mr. Gardiner has been an individual investor for over 30 years. He has used his financial acumen to select profitable investments and avoid unprofitable ones. He is an advocate of the "get rich slowly" method of investing, i.e. buy good solid companies and hold them.

Mr. Gardiner lives in Ottawa, where he now works as a free-lance writer, having been given an early retirement package from Bell in 2000. He is a frequent contributor to the Investor's Digest of Canada. He is married to Ida May Gardiner, a decorative artist. They have two teenage children.