Although ordinary shares have for many years now been accepted by the actuarial profession as suitable investments for a portion of the assets of insurance companies and pension funds there is very little in the journals of the Institute or of the Society that will help students to discover the methods by which the merits of individual shares are judged. There are indeed papers dealing generally with ordinary shares [e.g. H. E. Raynes: ‘The place of ordinary stocks and shares (as distinct from fixed interest-bearing securities) in the investment of life assurance funds’, J.I.A. Vol. LIX]; but apart from these the only one dealing with methods is that by the late R. B. Gough in J.S.S. Vol. v, No. 1. This has become a little out of date especially since the new Companies Act which followed the report of the Cohen Committee. I therefore propose to set out the methods which I believe are now generally accepted for the preliminary examination of the record of a company, and then to indicate lines upon which further investigations might be made.