SPRE puts genuine Compustat fundamentals, ratios, and stock prices in front of every student in the course - in the browser, through a guided interface, with no terminals to book and no programming prerequisite. Nine ready-to-assign exercises below, sequenced across a full semester.
Built for Teaching
The usual barriers between undergraduates and real financial data are the tooling, not the finance. SPRE removes the tooling.
Every student works from their own laptop, at the same time. No booking a seat in the lab, no queueing for a shared terminal the week the assignment is due, and no rationing access across multiple course sections.
The guided interface walks students through picking companies, variables, and date ranges. Data arrives as a clean download ready for Excel - so class time goes to interpreting the numbers, not troubleshooting the retrieval.
Students analyze the same standardized S&P Global data used in published finance research. What they learn transfers directly to upper-level courses, research assistantships, and the tools they'll meet on the job.
Ready to Assign
Each exercise maps to a standard Intro to Finance topic and names the SPRE dataset it draws on. Use them as-is or adapt them to your syllabus.
Assign each student a public company and have them locate revenue, operating income, total assets, debt, and cash in SPRE's annual financials - then place each item on the income statement, balance sheet, or cash-flow statement.
Students use SPRE's pre-calculated ratios to assess a company's profitability, liquidity, leverage, and valuation - and are required to explain what the ratios mean, not simply dump numbers into a table and declare the company “good.”
Small groups compare three companies in the same industry on margins, ROA, ROE, leverage, and valuation multiples. Each group recommends which company looks financially strongest - and defends the call.
Students decompose return on equity into profit margin, asset turnover, and financial leverage - comparing firms side by side, or tracing one company over several years to see what actually drives its ROE.
Five to ten years of revenue growth, earnings growth, margins, and ROA demonstrate that rapid growth does not automatically create profitability - or shareholder value, despite what enthusiastic pitch decks may claim.
Pair quarterly financials with daily returns to examine how a stock behaved around an earnings announcement - introducing earnings surprises, event windows, information efficiency, and the gap between strong results and results that beat expectations.
Compare P/E, price-to-book, and other valuation ratios across firms. Does a higher multiple mean overvaluation, better growth prospects, lower perceived risk - or some combination? A useful cure for treating P/E ratios like magic verdict machines.
Compare debt levels, interest burden, profitability, and stock performance across companies with different financing policies. Students weigh the benefits and risks of leverage and recommend whether a company should borrow more, pay down debt, or hold steady.
The capstone: teams select several companies, analyze financial statements, ratios, industry position, historical returns, risk, and valuation, and recommend one stock to a fictional university investment committee. A short presentation and a written investment memo serve as the final deliverables.
A Sensible Progression
Early Semester
Middle Semester
Later Semester
Final Project
Because SPRE is browser-based and licensed campus-wide with unlimited users, these assignments scale across multiple sections without rationing seats or requiring research-computing support. If your students have a browser and Excel, they have everything the course needs.
Start a 2-week free trial with full access to all five datasets - enough to run any of these assignments yourself before putting SPRE in front of a class.