A balance sheet is Ricky is just a moment in time, right? It is what is the financial

position at this moment in time? I think from a more comprehensive analysis of the balance sheet. You should have multiple balance sheets.

You should be looking across quarters. You should be looking across years and see how things have changed. I'm Ricky Mulvey and that's Motley Fool Candida's Jim Gillies.

He joins me on today's show for a class on balance sheets or how investors can understand what a company is keeping on its books.

We've also got an in-depth look at Lulu Lemon and some stories about the company beyond its surface

numbers.

And at the end, we've got some under- some under the radar companies with strong balance sheets.

A few notes before we get started, one, I want to let you know this show gets to some more advanced

concepts than our normal stuff.

You also might notice that Jim's audio clips a bit,

and we're also off on Monday for Labor Day.

Hope you're having a good long weekend,

and we'll be back on Tuesday.

Jim, Balance Sheet Day has finally arrived. I think we've promised this on, what is it, like two or three weekend shows now,

but we're finally here.

No more stories about Nortel networks. We're going straight,

we're going straight to the balance sheet. I think a good place to start for this is just to kind of walk through

your process when you're maybe checking out a company for you know when it's

going through your process what are the balance sheet checks that you're doing?

Sure there's a number and a lot of them are actually the financial statements work together.

You really can't focus on one because you got to bring things and so while you are looking at the

balance sheet you'd be looking at the amount of debt a company's got, the amount of cash a

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