Firms that trade on the Canadian Stock Exchanges are required to disclose information on a regular basis to the System for Electronic Document Analysis and Retrieval (SEDAR). For a summary of the documents Canadian publicly traded firm must disclose see the Toronto Stock Exchange Filing Guide. These are the primary documents for researching publicly traded firms in Canada. The most commonly used are the Annual Information Form (AIF) which contains include a wide variety of information of the operation of the firm, its properties, any pending or potential legal proceedings and a wealth of financial information. It is equivalent to Form 10-K is the U.S. The Management Information Circular (MIC) is distributed in advance of the annual meeting and includes information on items to be voted on, background information on Directors, and board and management compensation. The Management Information Circular is equivalent to Form DEF14A (proxy statement) in the U.S. SEDAR provides a complete list of the information they collect.
The AIF and MIC, along with additional information, is available from SEDAR, and is also often available on the company website which may also incude a link to their own annual report and other information. In addition to the primary documents, a variety of firms compile and repackage this information for use by researchers. This includes free sites such as Yahoo Finance or MSN Money as well as fee-for-use companies such as Dunn and Bradstreet, Standard and Poor’s and Mergent Online.
On this site we will use only free sites commonly available on the internet. Note that there is section at the end of each questions of websites that are available only to Carleton University students which the general user will not have access to. These are excellent sites for corporate research and you should check with your local public library, university or college library to see if these sites are available to you.
Explore The Private Sector Chart. It provides a visual representation for the kinds of information that needs to be gathered and a sequence for conducting the research on Canadian publicly traded firms. Look in the Resources Section to find various print versions of this chart.
To begin, start with Question 1 on the right and work down the list to complete a basic corporate profile. Good luck!