441–450 of 491 posts
Well, this is going to make insider information a lot more powerful... You've got 364 days in between the truth, and if you think a company is fudging it's numbers you've got to wait another 365 before anything else comes out.
The proposal is to change to bi-annual. Not annual.
Personally I think it might be better to be longer term oriented, but audit teams will lose revenue... Or just have a harder time reconciling longer time periods.
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But on what time scale? Before a few connected entities make a profit or after?
But that doesn’t matter to your retirement. Don’t sell your retirement at 3am and the liquidity at 3am isn’t your problem.
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Help me understand what you are saying here. For those that don't know this one is "a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". I'm not advocating for a single metric that can be gamed. A business is fundamentally about dollars in and dollars out. Maybe add receivables in there and a few other metrics from the P&L. I'm not trying to be prescriptive here on purely cash in and out. I do think there is…
All data that is externally visible about a public company will be consumed by traders and used to inform their market behavior. Companies know this, thus every action they perform that affects an externally visible number is calculated both for the actual intent of the action, and how that action effects the number and the consequent market behavior. This is why you see all sorts of moves that aren't strictly helpfu…
Companies can already make press releases whenever they want yet non fraudulent ones fail to move the market in a predicable way. If someone is committing fraud I want to know about it instantly not in 3 or 6 months. This is just a gimme to Elon's scam empire from an organization he "has no respect for".
Would there be any incentive for companies to still report quarterly? would reporting make them appear more transparent than 6month reporter competitors in their space?
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> You can’t serve up intentionally stale information without inviting legal repercussions. > These are being revised and updated right up until the point they are released to provide the most accurate reporting possible. > You gravely underestimate the legal seriousness of these reports. All of these seem look like an argument for additional automation.
It is not a technology problem.
Going over what I quoted:
> You can’t serve up intentionally stale information without inviting legal repercussions.
Keeping information fresh and up to date is something technology has helped with in many areas. If there is a reasons why it can not help here then I an interested in why or that the current tech already does a good enough job in this area.
> These are being revised and updated right up until the point they are released to provide the most accurate reporting possible.
Technology can help verify last minute changes, running a test suite for example or similar. How hard that is to make or maintain though may make impractical.
> You gravely underestimate the legal seriousness of these reports.
Having an audit trail and known processes may be helpful here too if the current tooling is not adequate.
I quoted parts of the comment that looked like areas where tech has already helped in other areas. What I want to find out are details about what exists, why people think it can not be better, or why pervious attempts have failed, or why things are currently optimal.
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I'm having a hard time responding to someone who's using a South Park episode as a discussion point. Like how can I debate a point made by a show that makes content reacting to the popular perception of certain ideas? That's like 2 levels removed from the actual true details. Anyway the difference now is that those companies still exist they just take round after round of private investor capital and the employees ar…
> I'm having a hard time responding to someone who's using a South Park episode as a discussion point. Like how can I debate a point made by a show that makes content reacting to the popular perception of certain ideas? The South Park episode came out in 1998, when the profitability of tech companies was… questionable, but their popularity was very high. It was social commentary on the zeitgeist and group think of th…
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FWIW even if we weren't in this admin, I think it would be a harder sell to increase reporting requirements on private companies. The whole point of private capital and private companies is that LPs (edit: liquidity providers) are required to have some form of accreditation to prove that they aren't dumb money and that they have the capital to weather large drawdowns. The problem of growing private capital markets an…
Yeah. It's not obvious how to do it. I just wish that policy people would do some thinking in this direction. (Nit: I believe that in venture contexts, LP = "limited partners". A "liquidity provider" usually means the same thing as a market maker, at which point you're talking about the secondary / listed / public markets.)
One of my favorite stories about logistics and quarterly earnings deadlines (from when I worked at a pharmaceutical company: "In our business, a truckload of various drugs can easily reach $10-$15 million. Now, if that truck arrives at the depot at 11:59pm March 31st then it's first quarter earnings. If it arrives at 12:01am April 1st then it's second quarter earnings. $15 million is a BIG shortfall, even for us, so…
I don’t get it, why not just say “oh we were 15 million short that quarter and 15 million ahead this one so it’s all good” Like why get hung up on these arbitrary cutoffs
I've seen someone trying to explain to an investor that the numeric change between quarters wasn't meaningful. Investor seemed to understand explanation, but was clearly deeply unhappy about the chart not being tidy. People respond to that by trying to make the chart tidy, even if it means losing the company money at times.
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Smart employees understand this dynamic. When leadership hides information - it always means its bad. The first thing I noticed when I had a bout of bad employers was that they claimed "we can't share financial information because of XYZ investor/legal reason." Those startups all had major financial problems within 6 months to 2 years. Management has strong incentives to hide bad information from employees.
Most startups fail - it's almost definitional. Trying to connect the dots like you are attempting to, is a foolish game.