« ANNOUNCEMENT: Smart Money Needs Your Help on Bank Fees | Main | An Interesting Piece on Target »
An Interesting Investment Metric
By JLP | March 24, 2008
I was flipping through the March 31, 2008 issue of Fortune when I came across this tidbit on page 14 in the “My Metric” section at the bottom of the page:
Hal Varian, chief economist, Google:
“I always like to look at the number and obscurity of footnotes in a company’s 10-K filing. The larger the number and the more obscure the footnotes, the more likely ther is bad news coming in the next quarter.”
LOL! He’s probably right!
Topics: Investing | 1 Comment »
March 25th, 2008 at 11:16 am
I think the obscurity of footnotes is a better metric. Some industries have very standard footnotes (i.e. one describing inventory accounting – FIFO vs. LIFO) that shouldn’t count against them.