The Internet offers a quick source of information about shares, including an abundance of facts about companies and details of share prices.
Swedish Matchs own website is an excellent source of news about the company, not to mention its competitors and the sector as a whole. Here you can find, for example, press releases, financial reports and the publication dates of future reports. Other useful sources are the business media and share databases.
One limitation regarding the media websites is that they use the local language and their content may also have a local bias. An increasing number of media websites now charge a fee for the information they provide.
Information about a given company is also often provided on the websites of the exchanges on which the company is listed, although there may be a delay of 15-20 minutes on share-price information. Swedish Match is listed in Stockholm (www.stockholmsborsen.se), Germany (www.xetra.de) and New York (www.nasdaq.com). If you wish, you can follow share price movements in New York on your home computer after the European exchanges have closed. Remember the ticker code: SWMA or SWMAY.
THE SECURITIES AND Exchange Commission (SEC), lists all registrations of company information in its database EDGAR (www.sec.gov/edgar). Unfortunately, the documents contain a lot of very formal legal language. The company databases provide information about institutional shareholders, analysts assessments, and so forth. Among the better databases are www.my.zacks.com and www.biz.yahoo.com, which offer basic information in the form of analyses and general company information, in addition to share prices and key ratios. Shareholder information is also available on www.reuters.com and www.multexinvestor.com. On both these sites, users can set up their own share-watch profiles.
www.corporateinformation.com and www.hoovers.com are American databases that provide written analyses and comparisons with other companies. MSCI (www.msci.com) is a database for indexes. Swedish Match is included in the tobacco index but can also be compared analytically with a broader spectrum of consumer-products companies.