10th july 2015

Thank you Jesus, thank you Jesus, thank you Jesus. That’ s all I have to say. Today, the 10th of July 2015, i could have lost my life, but by his grace, I am still alive. Let me tell you what happened to me. I finished from the office at around 5.15 pm, then made my way to enter a bus home. Please don’t get it twisted, it is not like those buses in the UK or USA where you would pre-load a card and upon entering the bus, you swipe on an electronic card reader. Oo no! in this place you have to rush and hustle for bus, then deal with change palava.

I stayed at the bus stop for a long time without getting any bus plying my route. After about 15 minutes, a bus pulled over; it was a bus with a driver and no conductor (Someone in charge of collecting money from passengers). I hated entering buses like that because of change issues. Unfortunately, i had 500 naira and the transport fare was 150 naira. I knew that to collect my change in this type of situation would be very difficult; so I waited for the next one.

The next bus had a conductor, so I gladly jumped in. I gave him 550 naira to collect 400 naira change. We were off, cruising down the very protracted third mainland bridge. In the bus, i bowed my head to rest on the sit in front of me while listening to some music. All of a sudden there was an abrupt halt of the bus. I was furious and at the same time scared. I had heard tales of armed robbers harassing people on the bridge and all. when I got down to investigate, I noticed that one of the rear tires had almost removed; i yelled “Jesus christ!”, I was so thankful to God that we noticed early; if we did not and continued on the journey, sooner or later the tire would have removed, and we would have tumbled and plummeted to our doom.

Thank you lord for preserving me, that was all that was on my mind. They fixed the tire and even though I didn’t want to enter back, I had no choice because we were on an express and no car was slowing down or picking people up.

That aside, let me share with you what I read today. I studied financial ratios and even though I had done them during my undergraduate days, I wanted to refresh the formulas In my head. These are the formulas classified into the following group (Note: not all the ratios were touched here):

Financial ratio analysis

Financial Ratios

Financial ratios are used in the process of financial statement analysis, they help in evaluating management performance in areas such as risk, profitability, efficiency etc.

Financial ratios are used to show relationships between individual values in the financial statements. A financial ratio on its own, is of little use. It should be compared with other entities to set a good picture of the performance of the company in relation to its competitors.

A firms performance can be compared to the following using financial ratios:

• Its industry / industry average: This is the comparison of the firms performance with a group of firms within the same industry, or the average of all the firms within the industry. The industry average is a very important comparison tool because different industries affect the firms within them, and it would be inaccurate and absurd to compare the firms with other firms outside the industry because some factors such as laws and regulations may affect one industry and may not affect the others.

• Time series analysis: In this, we examine the historical performance of a firm by comparing the ratios of the current year with previous year ratios. The time series analysis can be used to predict the value of a firm.

• Cross sectional analysis: In this we compare the firm to some group of firms comparable in size or characteristics. A problem which may occur from cross sectional analysis is that many of the big firms within an industry are usually diverse in their holdings and may have subsidiaries that carry out businesses in other industries, or they themselves might be multi-industry, with operators spanning across industries.