Reading the Story Behind the Profit is a one-week applied micro-course on Income Statement Analysis. It teaches a single, practical skill — reading an organization's statement of profit or loss and judging whether the reported profit reflects a real improvement, rather than reading the top and bottom lines alone. You choose one real organization's income statement in the opening lesson and carry it through all six lessons, learning to read and classify its revenue, expenses and profit subtotals, and to compute and interpret the gross, operating and net margins and their trend against a relevant benchmark. You also learn to separate recurring earnings from one-off gains, and to charge the owners' cost of capital so that accounting profit is set against economic performance.