Corporate earnings season may be winding down, but the real earnings season - annual 10-K filing season - starts today.
Corporate earnings announcements provide investors with limited and often misleading data. Only by reading all of the financial footnotes, which are only included in annual 10-K reports, can investors analyze true profits.
In the few 10-Ks already filed in 2019, the footnotes make one stock look better than what the headline numbers show.
Analyzing Footnotes Allows Us to Reverse Distortions in Reported Earnings and Valuations
Figure 1 shows that GAAP net income growth over the