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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: saukriver who wrote (24162)	5/4/2000 8:30:00 AM
From: Mike Buckley	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 54805

saukriver, Like many, even you just pointed to MSFT's $20B pile o' cash without noting the pile o' potential liabilities. You're right. There are a few reasons for that. The first two reasons have to do with the company's ability to offset those liabilities. Microsoft has billions of dollars of assets that can be easily sold and the company's operations generate billions in cash flow every year. The third is that I'm not an investor in Microsoft. I don't want to be accidentally misleading. I would like investors to easily be made aware of a potential liability without having to dig through the so-called fine print. On the other hand, so long as financial statements are prepared quarterly there really is a problem in presenting the statements in such a way that declares a liability that changes daily. That brings us to an interesting idea. David Gardner of the Motley Fool has said in the past that he would like the Fool's financial statements to appear online and be updated daily once the company goes public. He wanted that concept to be a model for all public companies. (I don't know if he still feels that way.) That would appear to solve the problem and allow potential liabilities to be entered at the current value. Doing it that way would present, though, the exactly opposite problem of requiring investors to read the notes that explain that the potential liability could become larger or smaller, implying that the financial statements should be monitored regularly when the stock price changes dramatically. Interesting, huh. --Mike Buckley