- Growth ratio. This basically shows how quickly the company has been growing. Within this ratio of numbers, you will find net income, sales and dividends.
- Profitability ratio. This shows you how well a company is operating. Some things to determine this ratio are net profit margin, gross margin, and pretax margin.
- Investment ratio. This ratio will show you how other investors are doing with the money they have invested into the company. It will show how much the returns were on assets, capital and equity. This may be one of the most important ratios to look at as an investor. Nothing can tell you better how your money will make a profit like how other investors are doing with their investments.
- Ratios of financial conditions. A company's financial condition will depend on how much leverage they have and how the company is using its interest payments. Within this ratio, a lot of factors are determining the numbers. These include interest coverage, current ratio (current assets and liabilities), debt to equity ratio, quick ratio (immediate financial situation), and leverage ratio and interest coverage.
- Price ratios. Compares the company's profit to the price that the company's shares are selling at. Things that make up this ratio are the price value compared to earnings, sales, cash flow and the book value.
- Management efficiency ratios. This includes assets turnover ratio, inventory turnover ratio, revenue per employee and revenue turnover ratio.

Understanding investor's ratios can be a very time consuming process. If you are a serious investor, you will find that this time spent will be worth every penny of your investment. If you get overwhelmed, there are brokerage firms and computer software programs that can help you with the process of figuring out ratios.

Most of the advanced computer programs such as Quicken and Microsoft come with second by second stock market information. They will have reports on ratios and margins that can help you figure out which investment is right for you.

There are books, magazines, newspapers and websites available for information on how to read ratios of your company, what they mean to you as an investor, and how to compare ratios of like companies to yours.

How much you understand of ratios will all depend on how much of an effort you as the investor put into learning about them. If you are a more of a "hands on" type investor, you will want to learn as much possible of all the different types of ratios and how they apply to your companies. If you have multiple investments and just like overviews of ratios, computer software programs may be the way to go for you. At the end of the day, you are the investor and how much you know and understand about your investment will be your responsibility.