You can find more about calculating the inventory turnover ratio in this AAII Journal article.

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The inventory turnover ratio should be particularly interesting to pay attention to when the majority of retailers report quarterly results in February.

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It is also useful to look at the inventory turnover ratio.

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Taking this a step further, you can determine the number of days it takes to completely turn over inventory by dividing the number of days in a period by the inventory turnover ratio.

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As of June, the inventory-sales ratio for retailers had returned to its downtrend, but was still above trend for wholesalers and, especially, manufacturers.

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Manufacturers ended 2011 with a 1.33 inventory-to-sales ratio, down from 1.34 in November.

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The total inventory-to-sales ratio ended the year at 1.26 on a seasonally adjusted basis, compared with 1.28 at the end of 2010, the government said.

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Still, he concedes there are signs that the semiconductor industry's key inventory measure, the book-to-bill ratio, has bottomed out.

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Two big factors behind these differences are the dissimilarity of the rental and for-sale inventory being used to compute the simple price-rent ratio and the big differences in property taxes between these two cities.

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