In stock markets, a tear sheet is generally referred to the Standard & Poor's summary sheet for public companies. These sheets provide up-to-date information about companies including their business overview, financial performance, and key fundamental metrics.

They are referred to as tear sheets because years back, S&P used to have summary books, and the stock brokers would literally tear pages from these summary books to send to clients. Of course, now all information is available online. So, any web page containing summary information about a company could be called a tear sheet.

For someone doing stock research, there are many good sources for tear sheets (online or print), such as Valueline, Morningstar Professional, S&P Capital IQ, Mergent Manuals, among others. For example, Mergent manuals, which was formerly called Moody's Manual, provides information about over 22,000 U.S. and foreign publicly traded companies. Value Line seems to have the best formatted tear sheets and is highly recommended by long-term investors.

The following is a sample tear sheet for a stock.

[caption id="attachment_22691" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Sample Tear Sheet[/caption]