Accounting statements represent a company's earnings, but this is not the real cash that a company generates. Earnings data can be manipulated and can be deceiving. Thus, corporate decision makers and security analysts focus on the free cash flow that a firm generates to analyze the company's real cash position. Which of the following statements best describes free cash flow?
The excess cash generated by revenues less all operating expenses
The cash flow available for distribution to all investors after the company has made all investments in fixed assets and working capital necessary to sustain a firm's ongoing operations

Which of the following statements is not correct? the stock of publicly owned companies must generally be registered with and reported to a regulatory agency such as the sec. when stock in a closely held corporation is offered to the public for the first time, the transaction is called "going public, or an ipo," and the market for such stock is called the new issue or ipo market. "going public" establishes a firm's true intrinsic value and ensures that a liquid market will always exist for the firm's shares. if you wanted to know what rate of return stocks have provided in the past, you could examine data on the dow jones industrial index, the s& p 500 index, or the nasdaq index.