7 Useful Things You'll Find On a Company's Website

When thinking about investing in a company, there are lots of tools that can offer insight. Media sources, newsletters, online searches, detailed quotes, regulatory sites and more can unearth all kinds of relevant information for an investor. While often not the go-to place for information for many investors, a company's own website also has tons to offer.

Public companies are required by financial regulators to post a swath of information on their websites to let investors know how they're performing financially and to provide key pieces of information.

Let's face it, though, company websites can be hard to navigate. How do you cut through the promotional pitches or sign-up/log-in pages to find the goods relevant to an investor? A good place to start can be headers like "Investors" or "Investor Relations," and "Press" or "News." That's largely where you'll find what you're looking for from an investing viewpoint.

So what might you find? Here are seven specific areas you can dig into to help inform your investment decisions:

1. Financial Reports: This is where you'll find the real meat of the company's financial background and information — including measures like revenue, profit (or loss), earnings per share and operating costs. You'll find specifics on how certain segments have performed. Footnotes can be particularly interesting, offering specifics on any charges or special items a company may have recorded.
2. Management's Discussion and Analysis (MD&A): Published alongside financial results, the MD&A give a glimpse into the company's strategic plans, market and financial outlooks, risk management and more. It's really meant to explain things through the eyes of management, expanding on what's in the financial statements.
3. Shareholder or Stock Information: If you want to know how the company's stock has performed, here's where you'll find it. You can review specific share price information, including how the stock has traded at over a 52-week period. Details on the company's dividend — if it offers one — are often here, as well as the names of analysts who cover the company.
4. News/Press/Media Releases: Companies generally publish news releases with information material to its operations. These can cover quarterly earnings reports, management commentary or extraordinary events like takeovers, expansions or any incidents which may affect its business.
5. Events and Presentations: Publicly traded companies report their results four times a year. You can find the dates for those announcements here, along with information on how investors can listen in to earnings calls. The company's calendar will also include dates for the company's annual general meeting and any upcoming management presentations. Archived calls are also posted here, so it's easy to catch up if you can't listen in live.
6. About/Company Background: You may already know what the company does, but this section will go into specifics, detailing things like products it makes and services it offers. You may discover parts of the business you never knew existed! It's here you'll often find a list of current management and board members as well.
7. Contact: Most companies will provide either a generic email address, or a contact for its head of investor relations, but some firms may list a direct number to the CEO — for those times you just want to ring up the boss! You can also often sign up for different notifications or alerts here, too.

While there's loads of information you can find on a company's website, keep in mind there are always two sides to a story. To balance your research, other resources like news sites, trustworthy blogs and more can help give you a more complete view of what's happening with a company. A quick online search will get you all the latest — just make sure it's a source of information you trust.

Finally, if you've heard about a statement or announcement by a company but are having trouble finding it, you can visit the SEDAR website, which is the electronic system through which all Canadian public companies must file their documents. The equivalent in the U.S. is the EDGAR database, where you can find Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) filings.