Earnings is the number that keeps CFOs awake at night. Nightmares of backlashing shareholders dance in their heads, in fear of a time when that number should ever prove dissappointing.
I’ll preface by saying that I’m not an accountant, and would welcome any comments by people commanding such expertise. Numbers can’t lie, but the game’s stakeholders may use them as tools to mislead and distract from the real issues. Here’s an example of a company creatively presenting earnings figures.

Sometimes it’s hard to get a true value investor to not talk about the facts and come with some emotion, just ask Jim Chuong! Does this mean that value investing fund managers don’t ever hard sell? There are always exceptions and Joel Greenblatt of Magic Formula Investing is one of them.
Though the site sounds more like it belongs to Ripley’s Believe It or Not, Joel considers himself a value investor and is the author of the book, The Little Book That Beats The Market (you can read excerpts on Amazon.com). …

If you are a regular Investorial reader, you may already have notice the new layout design. I spent the whole day creating this design on my PC and finally felt it was ready to be ported to the site.
I was acutely aware that visitors using Internet Explorer 6 were having difficulties with the stylesheet I was using in the last design (shown in picture). I hope this version will remedy those issues. I really do like this design better. A little house cleaning was needed to throw away some unnecessary …

“I just hired a young, award winning journalist to partner with me on a blog that will do nothing but try to uncover corporate fraud. Young, energetic, fired up and damn the stuff i have seen so far is good.”
– Mark Cuban

Billionaire Mark Cuban is no stranger to sharing his personal views about the stock market and its players. While he is busily waiting in anticipation for a Dallas Maverick NBA World Championship, he is still working on other ventures in the background.
One such venture is ShareSleuth.com, a …

Much thanks to JLP from AllFinancialMatters, for sending me an invite to try out Google Spreadsheets. I was interested to evaluate the web tool because many financial bloggers like to use, design and share spreadsheets. Google spreadsheets could be a great way to share such information! I looked around, tried a few features and even uploaded one of my own spreadsheets. After playing around for about 30 minutes, I decided to send Google a feedback. I thought I would share what I wrote:

This post will definitely be one of those memorable moments in Investorial’s history. Aside from being my first podcast, it is also my first interview with a fund manager, Jim Chuong! Jim will be the first to humbly tell you that being compared to the Oracle of Omaha is a bit much. But there certainly exist similarities. Jim founded the Chuong Investment Management (formerly The Toronto Investment Club). Chuong Investment Management (CIM) is an investment partnership that followed closely Warren Buffett’s own partnership structure when he first started. As well, …

The 26th edition of the Carnival of Investing is now up. Investorial’s review of Web 2.0 application StockPicker is one of the featured articles. Head on over and read up on some of the best investment articles deserving of the mention from the past week!
I also submitted a contrarian rant about what the term “ten best days of the year” may mean to different people, and also my first podcast interview with a proven fund manager, Jim Chuong. I’ve made the podcast entry sticky to stay as the first entry …