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Strategies & Market Trends : MDA - Market Direction Analysis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Vitas who wrote (26649)	9/22/1999 1:57:00 AM
From: Berney	Respond to of 99985

Vitas, I'm a very specialized bean counter! <g> The only part of the CPA exam that I had to retake in my youth was auditing. I never did like the concept. However, what I did like about accounting was (at the time at least) that there were only four concepts and nine principles, and after that just get the debits and credits in agreement. Now you as a bean counter should be able to make this very clear to me. You're kidding, right? Far be it from me to attempt to defend corporate accounting, earnings control, or accounting principles. I really don't like the conversation at all, but just got tired of seeing a lot of half truths and half-baked statements on this thread with no substantiation for the position. It's almost like if the statement is repeated enough times it becomes true. After looking at most of the summary earnings reports of the 65 Big Boyz, I'm totally convinced that the whole concept of using PE ratios is a joke. Eventually, I hope to move to looking at PCF (Price to Cash Flow). As someone once said, no business goes out of business because they have negative earnings. They go out of business for one reason and one reason only -- they run out of cash. Finally, as to LU, one cannot look at financial statements for one period in a vacuum and say they did this, that and the other. The issue is, how this compares to prior statements. Who has the time? There is an implicit trust between management and the shareholders that the financial statements "fairly" represent the results of their operations. No where is the standard of "accurately" required. Surely, there are numerous examples of the betrayal of this trust, but it part of the game, if one wants to play. Berney