Financial resources for the complete newbie?

April 27, 2016 5:59 PM

As an avid watcher of Shark Tank, I always hear phrases like "it is a so-and-so dollar industry" and "company x owns so-and-so percentage of the market" thrown around. Where can I find this type of information laid out in a layman-friendly way?
posted by omar.a to Work & Money (2 answers total)

For publicly traded companies, there's often a section about the overall industry dynamics in the company's annual report that has information like this. (It's not, however, in the quarterly reports usually.) You can get these at www.sec.gov - search for the form 10-K and read past the initial financial data. It's not exactly the most scintillating reading, but it should help with at least some of what you're after.
posted by Guernsey Halleck at 7:28 PM on April 27, 2016

IBIS World produces industry reports for more than 700 industries and covers US, UK and Australia. If you scroll down on the linked page, you get to individual product reports, like 'frozen pizza production', 'cigar lounges', 'instant drink mix production'.

The reports are not free (I've previously had access through employers or possibly academic institutions as the reports are not cheap), but you can see the headline figures without paying, e.g. for frozen pizza production, you can see it is $3bn a year with annual growth of -2.4%, employs over 14,000 people and involves 62 businesses, top ones being General Mills, Nestle and the Schwan Food Company. But without paying, you can't see the percentage of the market they own, or the detail of the report.
posted by AnnaRat at 1:29 AM on April 28, 2016