http://www.openlinksw.com:443/blog/kidehen@openlinksw.com/blog/?id=262Forbes Magazine Article Net margins and return on equity are popular metrics that investors turn to in an effort to identify the most profitable companies. One less-used measure is return on invested capital, or ROIC. Definitions of return on capital vary, but they all try to capture the same thing: how much a company has earned on all the capital it has invested, which includes both equity and debt. By including both, return on capital shows how a company uses all of its financial resources. For our purposes, we define ROIC as earnings before interest, depreciation and amortization divided by invested capital. Invested capital encompasses shareholders' equity, plus all long-term liabilities and short-term debt. WOW! We now use this metric to assess companies? Times have really changed! This could be the basis of an XBRL project, the goal being to produce an XQuery to filter for all companies with a positive ROIC. Watch this space, it would be a great Virtuoso demo! ROIC Industry Leaders Company Price Latest 12- Month Sales ($mil) Return On Invested Capital 2003 Estimated P/E 2003 Estimated EPS Growth Applebee's Int'l (nasdaq: APPB - news - people ) $28.73 $862 25.4% 17 15% AutoZone (nyse: AZO - news - people ) 86.60 5,407 30.7 17 26 CVS (nyse: CVS - news - people ) 27.08 24,524 16.8 14 10 Dell Computer (nasdaq: DELL - news - people ) 32.45 35,404 32.9 33 24 HCA (nyse: HCA - news - people ) 32.42 20,129 18.1 11 10 McClatchy (nyse: MNI - news - people ) 59.95 1,087 13.4 20 7 PepsiCo (nyse: PEP - news - people ) 43.47 25,541 25.9 20 12 Select Medical (nyse: SEM - news - people ) 19.68 1,167 18.8 16 33 University of Phoenix Online (nasdaq: UOPX - news - people ) 45.16 418 39.1 51 66 Wal-Mart Stores (nyse: WMT - news - people ) 55.49 244,524 15.6 27 13 Prices as of May 13 (with XBRL it would as of last XQuery). Sources would read: Would be my Virtuoso DB instance. Wed, 14 May 2003 17:34:58 GMTVirtuoso Universal Server 08.03.3334Kingsley Uyi Idehenhttp://www.openlinksw.com:443/weblog/public/images/vbloglogo.gifhttp://www.openlinksw.com:443/blog/kidehen@openlinksw.com/blog/?id=262I have seen the future and it's full of Linked Data! :-)8831