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Analyst Traps
Prior to entering graduate school almost 20 years ago, I had a very important phone conversation with an analyst at the Dreyfus Founders Funds, Chuck Reed. That brief phone conversation changed my focus in graduate school – and hence my life. One of the questions I asked Chuck was, "What skills should I acquire that most analysts overlook?" He answered unequivocally, saying, "Most analysts do not understand accounting."
Shocking as it may seem, I still believe Reed’s two-decade old admonishment to me remains true, even despite the emphasis made by CFA Institute in its CFA charter program. Here are what I believe are the top five accounting mistakes analysts make.
1. Using Generalized Financial Statements
If analysts take the time to actually read financial statements – and I think that few of them actually do – it is likely that they digest them through a third-party provider, such as Bloomberg, FactSet, S&P Capital IQ, Reuters, Yahoo! Finance, etc. The problem with this approach is that each of these services modifies each company’s unique financial statements to fit into a pre-created template. These services do this to ensure comparability across companies, industries, and nations.
However, I would argue that the generalization of these financial statements