MARKETS / GLOSSARY / RETURN ON ASSETS

Return on assets

Profit per dollar of everything the company controls, borrowed or owned. It answers the question ROE cannot: how productive is the asset base itself, ignoring who financed it.

Definition

How it is computed here

Formulanet income ÷ average total assets
UnitRatio (shown as %)
PeriodOne fiscal year, as reported
SourceExtracted from SEC filings; every value on an asset page carries the accounting tag and the filing it came from
Identifierroa
The limit

What this number does not tell you

Assets are carried at accounting values that can be decades old or freshly written up after an acquisition. Two companies with identical operations show different ROA if one grew by buying and the other by building.

Every metric on this site is published with its blind spot stated. A figure without its limit is half a fact.

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