Course Project Suggestions:Use Yahoo Finance, Google Finance, Etrade, Charles Schwab or any other finance website available to investors to research 2 or 3 companies in a similar line of business.  You can also go the companies’ websites directly and download their annual reports.  Most of the time, it can be found in the “Investors Relations” section of the website.  For example, you can choose to compare a company with the industry leader and discuss what improvements the company can make to make its financial position stronger or more competitive vs. the industry leader using the tools discussed in Chapter 13 and/or Chapter 12.  Alternatively, you can take the position of a stock analyst and recommend a stock to invest based on your comparison of 2 or 3 companies in the same industry after you perform financial statement analysis and ratio analysis.  Lastly, you can compare an internet based firm with a brick-and-mortar competitor and evaluate what you see as strengths of the internet firm vs. its retail competitor using the tools discussed in Chapter 13 and/or Chapter 12.  Choose companies that are in the same industry, have similar products or service, and are competing for the same customers.  Use common size financial statements to account for any differences in size.Course Project Guidelines:Project write-up should be about 3 to 5 pages.  Grade will be based on effort and quality of the analysis to convince an investor about your recommendations.  Those pages should be devoted to analysis.  Do not put financial statements, ratio calculations, or graphs in your 3-5 pages.  Those items belong in an appendix.  You should refer to those items in your write-up.  Do not use any outside sources of opinion from investment experts in your project.  The analysis needs to be based on your own words using what you learned in this course after you have reviewed the company financial statements.  There is not a limit on how many pages should be in the appendix.  Use discretion.  Submit in WebAccess by deadline.  Do not email to me.