Economic Earnings Vs GAAP Earnings
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3 Ways Accounting Tricks Can Crash Your Portfolio

Buried in the footnotes and MD&A, you can find where reported expenses understate true costs, red flags for earnings manipulation and significant differences that need to be reconciled when comparing companies. If you want to understand the underlying economics of the company’s business, you have to understand its accounting policies.
by Sam McBride
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XBRL: Getting Better, But Work Left To Do

Back in 2013, we wrote about all the errors and issues we discovered when attempting to use XBRL data for our models. In the past couple years, XBRL has definitely come a long way in terms of improving the quality of the data, but there’s a lot of work left to do.
by Sam McBride
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Too Much Goodwill: A Red Flag For Your Portfolio

Analysts and investors tend to spend very little time on Goodwill when looking at financial statements. In reality, Goodwill is an important number to keep an eye on. Since it reflects the money paid for acquisitions above the market value of the acquired company, it can signal overpayment, reckless spending, and the potential for damaging write-downs in the near future.
by Sam McBride