Wall Street insiders eschew GAAP earnings in favor of metrics they can more easily manipulate, such as non-GAAP earnings, whisper numbers, and Street Earnings.
GAAP Earnings are, by no means, perfect, largely because of the numerous accounting rule loopholes that open the door for legal earnings manipulation.
However, Wall Street’s solutions (non-GAAP earnings, whisper numbers, and Street Earnings) worsen the problem instead of fixing it. That’s right, non-GAAP earnings, whisper numbers, and Street Earnings tend to be more misleading than GAAP Earnings. Don’t believe us? See Figure 5.
The Real Solution
Our Core Earnings[1] are proven to provide investors with a superior measure of profits because they do a better job of adjusting for unusual gains and charges, which are often buried in footnotes that Wall Street tends to ignore.
We leverage our Robo-Analyst AI Agent for investing to scour the footnotes and MD&A of financial filings to calculate Core Earnings across the entire market. In this report, we’ll show:
- the prevalence and magnitude of overstated GAAP Earnings in the S&P 500,
- that Street Earnings (and GAAP earnings) are flawed and misleading,
- how Core Earnings generate novel alpha, and
- the five S&P 500 companies most likely to miss 3Q25 earnings.
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