A financial ratio by itself tells us little about a company since financial ratios vary a great deal across industries. There are two basic methods for analyzing financial ratios for a company: time trend analysis and peer group analysis. Why might each of these analysis methods be useful? What does each tell you about the company's financial health?

When doing time trend analysis for financial ratios we can know how a company's ratio's have changed over time or if they have remained the same, so for example if a company's current ratio was less than 1 a year ago and is 3 now it means that the company was not very liquid a year ago but since then has made changes because of which it is liquid now, so we can see how a company has performed over a certain period of time.

On the other hand peer group analysis tells us how a company is performing compared to other companies in the same industry. For example if our cement company has a profit margin of 7% but the industry average is 15% we know that our company is doing something wrong or different as compared to the industry and we can look into it.