STUDY SAYS A.G. EDWARDS TOP PUBLICLY HELD FIRM

ST. LOUIS A.G. Edwards & Sons, Inc., a stock investment firm headquartered in St. Louis, was recently named as the top company in a recent study of financial performances of publicly held companies in the St. Louis metropolitan area.

The study, published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, was based on a weighted score of 50 companies' total revenue, return on equity percentage, increase in sales percentage and increase in profits percentage during the period from December 1990 to November 1991.

To be eligible for the survey, a company had to have been publicly owned since January of 1991, had revenue of at least a million dollars in 1991, and $500,000 in revenue in 1990. The firm must also have shown a profit from continuing operations in the past two years and not shown negative common shareholders's equity for the last two years.

A.G. Edwards, which has more than 450 branch locations in 48 states and the District of Columbia, ranked first overall in the survey.

In addition, the firm ranked second in percentage of increase of profit from 1990 to 1991 (68 percent); fifth in return on equity (increase of 22 percent) and ninth in profit margin (10.9 percent) in 1991.

Some of the major companies included in the survey were Anheuser-Busch, Venture Stores, McDonnell Douglas Corp., Ralston Purina, Southwestern Bell Corp., Boatmen's Bancshares, Inc. and May Department Stores.

McDonnell Douglas was number one in the St. Louis area in employment and overall revenue. McDonnell employs more than 109,000 people nationwide, with over 31,000 of them in the St. Louis area. The firm was tops in revenues in 1991 with $18.4 billion nationwide.

A.G. Edwards, which also has a branch at Cape Girardeau, employs more than 9,000 nationally, with 2,094 employees in the St. Louis area.

A.G. Edwards also recently received the only five-star rating among brokerage firms in a 1991 Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine service comparison.

The Edwards firm was founded in 1887. It provides a full range of financial products and services to individual investors. A.G. Edwards is a member of the New York, American and all other major securities and commodities exchanges.