This Secret Could Have Made You 14 Times Your Money
Editor's note: Don't let Wall Street pull the wool over your eyes...
Few things move a stock faster than an earnings report. If a company beats Wall Street's expectations, shares rise. And if its performance falls short, the stock takes a hit. Naturally, investing "pros" base their buy and sell recommendations on what they assume are accurate numbers.
But what if the data are wrong?
As our good friend and Altimetry founder Joel Litman stresses, the standard way companies report their numbers is flawed and misleading. He says that's why most research coming out of institutional Wall Street can't be trusted...
So Joel created his own system for assessing a company's books. And his unique strategy could help you boost your earnings exponentially...
In today's Masters Series, adapted from the September 19, 2019 issue of our free DailyWealth e-letter, Joel details how financial statements can deceive investors... explains his method for determining a company's "real" data... and reveals how you can multiply your money by using his strategy...
This Secret Could Have Made You 14 Times Your Money
When I first started looking into universities and careers, my mother advised me simply...
Go into accounting. Learn the language of business. Then no one can pull the wool over your eyes.
I had no idea how prescient that advice would be. But eventually, over a career that has lasted more than 25 years, I found out just how right she was.
I discovered that reported financial statements and Wall Street research cannot be trusted. Worse, most of the investment world does not recognize this at all.
But this widespread problem doesn't have to threaten your investing portfolio. In fact, you can use it to your advantage...
Today, I'll show you a better way to understand and value your investments. I'll even show you how it could help you make multiple times your money... right under the noses of Wall Street experts.
There's tremendous value in understanding a company's true financial status.
Unfortunately, performance metrics like the price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio and discounted cash flow are terribly distorted... and in some cases, totally useless.
How could this be?
Without getting too technical, the problem lies with the standards of as-reported financial statements... specifically under generally accepted accounting principles ("GAAP") and international financial reporting standards ("IFRS").
For instance, a firm may report increased earnings when, in fact, its performance has faltered. P/E ratios may show stocks are expensive when they're actually cheap. Margins, assets, capital expenditures, debts, and virtually all key financial performance indicators can be a far cry from an accurate representation of corporate activity.
A simple example is the FIFO/LIFO accounting policy that management teams choose for reporting cost of goods sold and inventory levels...
It's perfectly acceptable for one company to use the LIFO (or last-in-first-out) method for reporting cost of goods sold. The company just assumes that the last goods added to inventory are the first ones to be sold. Meanwhile, a peer company could choose the FIFO (or first-in-first-out) method – the reverse.
Both companies have chosen a perfectly legal and acceptable accounting method under GAAP. However, these firms now have incomparable profits, costs, and balance sheets. Many other key financial performance indicators will also fall victim to this simple change.
And that's just one example. My team and I have identified more than 130 similar inconsistencies that can crop up in financial results.
Believe it or not, this isn't about lying CEOs trying to "massage" their earnings. The problem is institutionalized...
The financial-reporting authorities have established a set of standards that have been argued, debated, and then cemented over decades and decades. Unfortunately, the result is a set of inconsistent accounting rules that reflect a mixture of different goals.
All of this probably sounds daunting. If most financial statements are wildly inaccurate, how can everyday investors know anything?
You should be asking yourself a different question: How can you use this to your advantage?
These accounting problems mean it can be misleading to value a company based on the available information. In other words, Wall Street is getting it wrong!
The data the pros are using, the screeners they're using, the models... they're all wrong. And that gives us an edge on Wall Street – and on most of the investing world.
In order to see the true picture, my team and I have come up with a solution. We comb through the financial statements of more than 25,000 publicly traded companies around the world. We take them apart... and then put them back together using globally consistent standards that repair these problems.
As an example, let's look at streaming giant Netflix (NFLX). Below, you'll see the publicly reported "return on assets" (or "ROA")... in other words, the cash return that Netflix makes based on each dollar it invests into its business.
This is what the world believes to be true about Netflix.
According to the reported numbers, even in the early years, Netflix's ROA was only about 2.2%... not very impressive.
The real picture, though, is much different. We took another look at this company using our method (which we call "Uniform Accounting").
The blue bars are our adjusted and real return on assets for Netflix, dating back to 2005. Take a look...
ROA was 36 times higher in some cases. We arrived at these numbers by deconstructing and then rebuilding Netflix's entire balance sheet... correcting all the built-in mistakes.
You could have bought the stock based on just this information as late as 2012 – when as-reported metrics made it look like returns were 0.9% – and still made 14 times your money.
The discrepancy was still massive even in 2020. The true number was 5 times higher than investors believe.
And it's not just that... The real numbers warned us before the close of 2021 that the company's fundamentals were rolling over. We knew before anyone else that you should sell Netflix stock.
While the public numbers showed ROA rising from 7.8% in 2020 to 9.2% in 2021, the real numbers showed returns really dropped from 41.4% to 26% – a worrying sign.
That's why we told our readers to get out of Netflix on June 8, 2021, when the stock was still at $492. That's before it dropped 61% to nearly $200 today.
This is the power of our Uniform Accounting metrics. We can sift through the results looking for great companies that are widely mispriced... and find chances to make multiple times our money. And we can also find when to get out of them.
These discrepancies are all over the stock market. All you have to do is look for them.
Best,
Joel Litman
Editor's note: Joel believes that when you can see the real financial numbers behind a stock – which his system allows him to do – you can always find opportunities to profit... even in tough times like we're seeing today.
But he says that there's a much bigger problem than a crash headed our way... It could turn out to be a massive financial "heist" you've likely never considered before. And a hidden opportunity within could present a far greater opportunity than gold, ordinary stocks, bonds, or cryptocurrencies... Click here for the details.