Annual reports are strong for the breadth of information discussed, but with respect to depth are better used for internal analysis. They provide an overview of external issues but that overview should be supplemented with other research. Trade magazines and academic journals often have very specific articles that may or may not be of relevance to an external analysis. When they are relevant, they tend to provide excellent detail. Analyst conference calls, as with annual reports, are best used for internal analysis, but in these calls if management feels that external forces were the key factor in firm performance in the past quarter, the discussion will center on that performance. The Bureau of Economic Analysis is valuable for learning about broad economic trends, but those trends are not put into context of the industry. Newspaper articles may be excellent sources, but they can also be useless. Information literacy is required when skimming newspapers for information, to separate pieces full of bias from those that provide useful information. Overall, external analysis requires a lot of inference because the sources are not created in the context of your company. The researcher must observe...

Arguably, that is more important than gathering hundreds of sources and not being able to make connections between the external environment as described in those sources and the firm.
Works Cited:

Websters Online. (2010). Retrieved May 15, 2010 from http://www.webstersonline.com/searchresults.asp?category1=company&searchvalue=southwest+airlines&state_prov=&search=Search&AddInfo=

FareCompare.com. (2010). Retrieved May 15, 2010 from http://www.farecompare.com/

Bureau of Economic Analysis website: http://www.bea.gov

LaMotta, L. (2009). Southwest soars despite fuel costs. Forbes.com. Retrieved May 15, 2010 from http://www.forbes.com/2009/01/22/southwest-airlines-fuel-markets-equity-cx_lal_0122markets12.html

Q1 2010 Financial results conference call transcript. Retrieved May 15, 2010 from http://phx.corporate-ir.net/External.File?item=UGFyZW50SUQ9MjU2NDQ5NXxDaGlsZElEPTM3ODMzNHxUeXBlPTI=&t=1

2009 Southwest Airlines Annual Report. Retrieved May 15, 2010 from http://www.southwest.com/investor_relations/ar2009.html