Another key financial performance indicator was that gross margins increased slightly to 74.1%.

FORBES: Dressing-Up Your Portfolio With Luxury Stocks

The measure is a key indicator of a financial health because it strips out the impact of newly opened and closed locations.

NPR: Wendy's Stands By Outlook Amid Transformation Push

An interesting sentiment indicator from Genesis Financial Technologies that uses the Commitment of Traders (COT) data also suggests that traders are not yet bearish enough on gold.

FORBES: Gold Sentiment Is Still Too Bullish

Value investors often look closely at dividend policies as a part of total return on an investment and an indicator of the financial strength and prospects for a company.

FORBES: Connect

While labor strife isn't necessarily a sign of financial turmoil, labor peace is often a leading indicator of stability, at least in sports, where struggling owners often blame their woes on player salaries and try to organize attempts to roll back compensation.

WSJ: Free of Strife, Baseball Turns to Trading

What happens to private equity may be a leading indicator of how the crisis in the financial system will affect the rest of the business world, both because private-equity deals are so dependent on large amounts of debt, and because many of the shrewdest judges of corporate value work for private-equity funds.

ECONOMIST: Business and the credit crunch

The indicator shows the annual average growth rate, based on financial statements filed in the most recent three months.

FORBES: Employment trend "clearly not super healthy yet"