Looking Forward Financial Ratio and Value Analysis (Valor de la firma y razones financieras para el análisis financiero)

Usually financial textbooks present the financial ratio analysis. Many courses are taught in financial analysis and teachers spend lot of efforts teaching how to calculate financial ratios. Most of them are used to analyze historical financial statements. These analyses are very useful in identifying historical policies and targets. It is useful to analyze a posteriori, the consequences of a given decision and in general the performance of the firm management. Also, they can be used as predictors of the performance of a firm using the proper discriminant analysis technique. However, examining historical financial statements is a kind of necropsy that does not help very much to reach optimal financial decisions. The most important management function is to increase the value of the firm. In this paper we present how the future decisions can be evaluated in terms of measuring the behavior of the firm value, given a decision to be analyzed. We also show the limitations of the traditional financial ratio analysis in reaching the target of maximizing the firm value