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I enjoy games of chance. I’m particularly fond of casino scenes in movies—tuxedos for men, slinky dresses for women, slow-burning cigarettes, and dry martinis all-around. In real life, casinos are about as alluring as a mud bath. In Europe, for example, you’ll find a casino in every sleepy spa town—massages and “water cures” are meant to give a virtuous sheen to otherwise seedy places. Not a Daniel Craig—or even a David Niven in sight.
The luck factor is probably one of the reasons I’m interested in stock markets too. There are many other things I’d rather do than actually work for money. Just pick a winner and off to the races we go! (Of course, it never quite works out that way—darn gravity.)
Sleight-of-hand is not only found in Monte Carlo casinos though. It’s alive and well in many corporations. This past week, quarterly results have started to trickle in. You can get an eyeful of some pretty nifty accounting in their filing reports.
I’ll admit that I’ve tortured myself in many ways: self-doubt, bikini waxes, watching two episodes of Vinyl…but I have yet to savor what is sure to be the retina-frying experience of exhuming a financial statement. When the quarterlies arrive at the door, I immediately deposit them straight into the recycling bin. Warren Buffett may have the patience to pick through financial statements with his mental tweezers; I would rather watch Casino Royale, or paint dry.
Here are a few common sleights-of-hand:
Share buybacks. When corporations buy their own shares it reduces the number of shares outstanding and it makes metrics such as cash-flow-per-share and earnings-per-share look much better than they otherwise would.
Extraordinary items. The “footnotes” section of the annual report is a dumping ground for all kinds of juicy expenses, some of which may be on-going. Items such as restructuring, acquisition, severance, write-downs of impaired assets, and data breaches all have an impact on profitability but are often shooed-away, (“don’t worry your pretty head about these darling”), as non-material.
Lower tax rates. While this is not accounting trickery, per se, by moving a company’s domicile to a low-tax country, such as Ireland, a corporation pays less overall tax. This gives their earnings a rosy hue. But these better looking numbers may have nothing to do with improved earnings through actual growth.
So, how good are today’s corporate earnings for reals?
Some investment brainiacs say that deflation is not out of the question. So, unless you’re James Bond, here’s a hot tip: don’t throw all your chips in.
Luck & Gravity 