Financial Ratios and Discriminant Analysis 609
gardless of any positive potential. Conversely, firms exhibiting these same
downside characteristics could be sold short, thereby enabling the portfolio
manager to be more aggressive in his other choices.
VI. CONCLUDING REMARKS
This paper seeks to assess the analytical quality of ratio analysis. It has
been suggested that traditional ratio analysis is no longer an important analytical
technique in the academic environment due to the relatively unsophisticated
manner in which it has been presented. In order to assess its potential rigorpusly,
a set of financial ratios was combined in a discriminant analysis approach
to the problem of corporate bankruptcy prediction. The theory is that
ratios, if analyzed within a multivariate framework, will take on greater statistical
significance than the common technique of sequential ratio comparisons.
The results are very encouraging.
The discriminant-ratio model proved to be extremely accurate in predicting
bankruptcy correctly in 94 per cent of the initial sample with 95 per cent of
all firms in the bankrupt and non-bankrupt groups assigned to their actual
group classification. Furthermore, the discriminant function was accurate in
several secondary samples introduced to test the reliability of the model. Investigation
of the individual ratio movements prior to bankruptcy corroborated
the model's findings that bankruptcy can be accurately predicted up to two
years prior to actual failure with the accuracy diminishing rapidly after the
second year. A limitation of the study is that the firms examined were all
publicly held manufacturing corporations for which comprehensive financial
data were obtainable, including market price quotations. An area for future
research, therefore, would be to extend the analysis to relatively smaller assetsized
firms and unincorporated entities where the incidence of business failure
is greater than with larger corporations.
Several practical and theoretical applications of the model were suggested.
The former include business credit evaluation, internal control procedures, and
investment guidelines. Inherent in these applications is the assumption that
signs of deterioration, detected by a ratio index, can be observed clearly enough
to take profitable action. A potential theoretical area of importance lies in the
conceptualization of efficient portfolio selection. One of the current limitations
in this area is in a realistic presentation of those securities and the tj^es of
investment policies which are necessary to balance the portfolio and avoid
downside risk. The ideal approach is to include those securities possessing
negative co-variance with other securities in the portfolio. However, these
securities are not likely to be easy to locate, if at all. The problem becomes
somewhat more soluble if a method is introduced which rejects securities with
high downside risk or includes them in a short-selling context. The discriminant-
ratio model appears to have the potential to ease this problem. Further
investigation, however, is required on this subject.