I agree that learning how to read a financial statement is valuable, but you might want to look further than just "is this company making an acccounting profit." Uber's core business is highly profitable, that's why it's valued at $45 billion.

When you're reading a financial statement, look at each business unit's profitability separately, especially if those units are in fact separate businesses. Ubereats is not Uber's bread and butter. Look at cash flow and compare it with investment in growth via R&D and marketing. Look at how much cash the business requires in the form of working capital and on-going maintenance capex vs growth capex.

I would suggest googling Warren Buffett's primer on look through earnings. Greenblatt's "Little Book that Beats the Market" can also be read quickly.

Losses, for years, are true for many successful and still around tech businesses.

Twitter is just one example. They didn't turn a profit until 2018.

I wouldn't write off Uber just because they're burning cash. Often this is done to secure markets by undercutting competitor pricing, or, aggressive R&D for future growth. Both of these tactics show losses for months, if not years, before things come to fruition.

> but the terms sheet doesn't quarterly earnings doesn't lie

There's an old saying that "profit is an opinion". It's harder to lie about revenue, but profit and loss can be adjusted by any number of accounting tricks that are perfectly 'legitimate'. Even auditors can miss the less-legitimate tricks.

A company might want to seem less profitable for for tax-reasons or because it's in a profit-sharing agreement (see Holywood Accounting). Or it might want to seem more profitiable to seem more stable (see Carillion and Interserve in the UK).

Reading a quarterly account does give a certain perspective on the health of a company, but quarterlies can be spun agressively by the company too.

I might start even simpler than that - learning how to understand the three basic financial statements (income statement, balance sheet, cash flow) and how they interrelate. This is super helpful in any job and in managing personal finance because understanding the statements provides a framework for understanding the dynamics of money (for example, understanding depreciation reminds you that the new car you just bought is declining in value, while the interest on your car loan is an expense).

And how to learn it?

Hilariously, I think most Gen-Xers learned from playing Railroad Tycoon computer game where the detailed score sheet is the three sheet financials. For a short period of time in the late 80s there were plenty of 12 year olds who understood quite a bit about financial statements and what they imply about how a game/business is being run.

I don't know the modern equivalent that motivates a game player to learn to read financials.

Obviously you can/could/do play RRT "just one more turn" all night long until 4am every day just like the Civilization series of games, although actually learning how the numbers interact with each other and in-game behavior probably took one hour spread out over time. None of the concepts are terribly complicated once you memorize the definitions and important ratios.

Honestly you could get a basic start at reading financials, if provided with experienced tutoring, in an hour of clock time while playing RRT.

It was kinda ridiculous half a decade later in high school taking econ class and seeing the dry and boring way they tried to teach reading financials. You could replace an entire multi week unit of the class with perhaps three class periods of playing RRT.

I think when I self-taught how to read public corporation financials, I did it just by looking up various definitions over time. There are not very many that matter. I did that when I was quite young, so I'm confident most any adult with even very basic financial literacy can do it in an hour to get started.

So for example, Uber, on Yahoo Finance (fairly simple data presentation):

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/UBER/financials?p=UBER

Columns displaying full fiscal years (you can change that to quarters optionally). And rows showing specific financial information, such as "total revenue" or "gross profit."

There are ~22 rows in a column year in the Yahoo data sets, each displaying different financial data. Of those, maybe a dozen are particularly important for an amateur to know.

So you'd look up the definitions for eg: revenue (sales), cost of revenue, gross profit, operating expenses, SG&A (selling, general and administrative expenses), operating income, income before tax, income tax expense, interest expense, net income. Another that can be useful as a new or amateur investor, is EPS, or earnings per share.

Investopedia is a reasonable option for learning the definitions, although there are numerous sites that will work fine.

Shouldn't take more than an hour to look those up and learn them at a basic level. After a bit of practice, you can scan a multi-year profit & loss (P&L) statement in a minute and have a great idea of how a company is fairing.

A balance sheet can be more complex, although it can similarly be boiled down to a dozen or so things that by far matter the most. You can get the definitions for those things and learn them in under an hour, then practice reading balance sheets.

Then last but not least for an amateur interested in such, would be to acquire practice at scanning through annual and quarterly reports filed by companies with the SEC. They're often obnoxiously long and overflowing with low-value bullshit, however only a small amount of the content tends to matter. I think the best way to keep that under an hour, would be to have someone mark off the segments worth always looking for / looking at in the filings, such that you can learn to jump to those sections to pick out important information. Beyond that, getting good at digesting company SEC filings will take a lot longer than an hour.

I wouldn't attempt to take on all of these things in under an hour, it'd be unreasonable. An hour each to get started however is doable. Starting with the P&L statement.

Any recommendations from you side as learning resources?