Handbook of Canadian Security Analysis

Jane M. Wilson is a Toronto-based chartered financial analyst in the
investment business.

It is the bane of every investment analyst’s life to find, after much
study of the art, that general techniques of financial analysis are of
limited help in appraising relative values in different industries.
There are few guides to industry analysis at all, let alone guides with
a Canadian perspective. This handbook offers an invaluable shortcut
around what otherwise might be exhausting study of multiple trade
sources (many of which are listed). The characteristics of the
industries represented in the TSE 300 are outlined by 15 profession
analysts. Macro- and microeconomic factors, benchmark values, common
yardsticks, and industry terminology are accompanied by demand/supply
charts, graphs of stock and commodity price relationships, ROE cycles,
and product and production life cycles.

The book will be a boon to sell-side analysts aspiring to be industry
specialists, and will be much valued even by buy-side analysts with
access to sell-side research. For those joining any industry in a
generalist capacity, the handbook is an excellent source of background
material. Knowledge of investment analysis is assumed particularly in
the oil and gas chapter. (BOE calculations and reserve valuation may be
less relevant now, but readers and many bond investors will regret the
lack of further elucidation.) Only the most intrepid part-time investor
will understand or employ all components of this encyclopedic work,
though they will appreciate the coverage of universal equity market
principles.

The final chapter on investment strategy brings the dynamics of the
different sectors into consonance in a grand unified theory of industry
timing using tactical, growth, value, and trend analysis. That it may
convince the naive that stock-market investing is a purely prescriptive
process is its only fault.