The Earnings Per Share ( Eps ) Benchmark Essay

In the open market share repurchase, the firm may or may not declare the repurchase. Depending on the market condition and the firm’s position in the industry, the firm can decide when and how many

When analysts question a firm’s earnings quality, it raises concerns regarding under or over aggressive accounting practices that may be allowing the firm to manipulate the earnings. Earnings quality is defined as the strength of the current earnings in being used to predict future earnings and cash flows. Since earning quality is indicative of future performance, analysts are more likely to address issues that have substantial impact on the earnings quality. An issue arises when the nature of the earnings is questioned. While permanent earnings are part of normal operations, any irregular, one time earnings can skew the earnings, making the firm look more profitable than it is. This is due to the inability to recreate similar one-time transactions that will give rise to such numbers. Investors prefer predictable

Marketing. Because of the large number of suppliers selling similar products, apparel-retail firms must stimulate demand with attractive store layouts, colorful product offerings, and various sales promotions.

This financial analysis report examines two high profile competitors, Dell and Hewlett Packard (HP), within the computer/technology industry in order to evaluate company performance and financial health. Overall company strategies were reviewed and considered along with the financial analysis to come to a conclusion for recommendation of investment. The reports introduction gives an overview to the computer/technology industry and expands on the strategies executed by Dell and HP. The financial analysis covers both companies’ common-size

Such an intense focus has been placed on quarterly earnings as an indication of a company’s success by everyone from analysts to executives that ethics have for the most part been thrown out the window, sacrificed to the all important number, i.e. earnings per share. This is the theory in Alex Berenson’s book “The Number: How the Drive for Quarterly Earnings Corrupted Wall Street and Corporate America.” This number has become part of a game to be played, a figure to be manipulated – beat the number and Wall Street all but throws a parade, miss it and a company’s stock may be abandoned. Take into account the incentives that executives have to beat the number and one can find plenty of reasons to manage earnings.

Industry averages and financial ratio reports determine the financial health of an organization. Solvent, efficiency, and profitability are compared by key financial indicators and ratios that measure several companies within the same industry. The publicly traded company chosen by Team A is ExxonMobil. “The largest publicly traded international oil and gas company in the world. ExxonMobil makes products that drive modern transportation, power cities, lubricate industry, and provide petrochemical building blocks that lead to

When companies set out to repurchase shares of its own stock, they are generally thinking that doing so will increase earnings per share rather than having a direct effect on its sales. In other words, there is no direct relationship on a company's sales if they decide to repurchase their stock. However, there are potential tax savings to shareholders. Companies can do a few things when providing value to their shareholders, they can either pay a dividend, which is a certain amount per share, per quarter, that puts money back into the investors original investment, or they can decide to repurchase their own stock, boosting earnings per share and the potential for their stock to grow exponentially because the number of shares outstanding is reduced.

Using a sample data comprised 297 NYSE and American Stock Exchange companies for 1977 to 1980-time period, indicating twelve quarterly announcements for each of the company. MacKinlay (1997) utilised 30 companies which comprised into Dow Jones Industrial Index, as a sample to test the impact of quarterly earnings announcements to stock prices. The researcher examined totally 600 quarterly announcements, thus MacKinlay (1997) obtained stock price response separately to bad news, good news and no news cases of earnings per share (EPS) announcements.

Like several companies, Nortel stipendiary their executives with stock choices (Collins, 2011). This compensation solely inspired the tendency to be but honest regarding the company’s finances. author closely-held stock choices that solely inspired his actions to fulfill or beat the benchmark set by analysts. If Nortel’s earnings showed to be higher than the benchmark, Nortel’s stock costs would rise creating the stock closely-held by management to be even a lot of valuable. By tweaking the books to indicate the road earnings price as critical the allowable accumulation price he created the stakeholders assume that the corporate was creating extra money than it had been. “Nortel ne'er incomprehensible a benchmark over the sixteen quarters (Collins, 2011).” it had been too tempting to bump the numbers up so the stocks gave the impression to be value over they were. “Nortel’s accounting practices junction rectifier to AN investigation by AN freelance review committee, that found that insubordination with accumulation and accounting fraud were undertaken to fulfill internally obligatory earnings targets (Collins, 2011).”

Pro forma earnings are earnings which often exclude non-recurring items and are defined by each individual firm rather than under the general accepted accounting principle (GAAP). Pro forma earnings reporting is commonplace in the U.S. (Doyle et al. 2013; Bentley et al. 2016). Items such as nonrecurring gains and losses, depreciation and amortization expenses, write-downs, restructuring and merger costs, stock compensation expenses, and interest expenses are often excluded in pro forma earnings figures. Since many of these exclusions are likely to be transitory in nature, pro forma earnings can be viewed as a better measure of permanent earnings and have received increasing focus recently. Research studies found that pro forma earnings are more value relevant, informative, and better associated with stock prices than GAAP earnings (Bradshaw and Sloan, 2002; Bhattacharya et al.,2003; Brown and Sivakumar, 2003; Entwistle et al., 2010). However, exclusion of the non-recurring items is completely discretionary (Doyle et al., 2013) and managers may use the flexibility to opportunistically influence the market’s perception of the firm’s recurring earnings (Dechow and Schrand, 2004). Managers may have strong incentives to manipulate the reported pro forma earnings to influence investors’ perceptions about the

Baruch Lev and Feng Gu authors of “The End of Accounting and The Path Forward for Investors and Managers” indicate that over the past 110 years, the structure and content of financial reports has not changed, and that the role that these reports play in influencing the decisions of investors has greatly diminished. Lev and Gu make a case that non-transaction events that are not captured by the financial reports such as those disclosed through 8-k filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) have a greater impact on stock prices, and thus more useful to investors. In addition, they suggest that one of reasons for the decline in usefulness of financial reports stems from the increase of estimates that has made its way into these reports (Lev and Gu 2016).

The first possible motive of the management is to hope to raise more capital as a result of increase in company’s stock price. It is widely known that stock price is an appropriate indicator of how a company performs financially since market is perceived efficient. Based on the company’s recent struggle in its financial performance, it is understandable that the management’s priority is to come up with a means to turn the financial situation around as soon as possible. By making aggressive accounting policy changes, the company would report profits in the financial statement so that the stock price tied to company’s financial performance might increase, resulting in the potential raise in capital. Hence, it is reasonable why the top management made the decision to change its accounting policy.

Nucor’s trends on the income statement, balance sheet, and ratio measurement show some concern.  There are positive and negative issues within the company.  The data from the financial analysis with Nucor addresses this issues where precise financial goals can counteract concerns in order to enhance the quality of investment.  The LIFO with Nucor controls planning and investments.  This limits Nucor abilities to make the adjustment without investors aiding the decision process.  In addition, Steel products and resources for the steel mill can be bought at a lower price from competitors with even a lower risk on investment.  The low risk does not guarantee to pay off any more than a high-risk investment.  However, Nucor is high risk with high buy in because cash flow is not effective and effectively being managed.  Therefore, I would not recommend buying stocks.  Because a drop in sales and market trends impact Nucor more than their competitors related to huge operation expense and product cost for manufacturing.  Therefore, I would recommendation wait until market trends drop in sales and cost of production, transportation, and labor before buying stocks with Nucor.  This would maximize investment by capitalizing on the risk of investment.  The leverage risk is maximized investment by bottlenecking investments until more gains are acquired on the market from changes in trends.  It does appear Nucor is headed in this direction with their purpose and

As indicated by the article, it is an argument about stock repurchases, and monetary financial experts express those corporate managers utilize repurchases to signal in their good faith about the company 's promises for the market. In general, the accord by all accounts that supervisors regularly say that they are repurchasing stock keeping in mind the end goal to expand profit per share. However, the creators recommend that this suspicion is defective and that contracting the extent of a firm just includes esteem if the company is neglecting to win its cost of capital on its peripheral ventures. In light of this article tragically that the case does not

In the underlying paper the author re-examines the conservatism principle and its asymmetric effects on earnings. With samples consisting of all firm-year observations from 1963 to 1990 with returns data on the CRSP NYSE/AMEX Monthly files and respective accounting data on the COMPUSTAT Annual Industrial and Research files, he formulates and tests four major hypotheses to find evidence for his predictions. At first he chracterizes “conservatism in accounting as the more timely recognition in earnings of bad news regarding future cash flows than good news”.1 In his first hypothesis he predicts a more sensitive response of earnings towards bad news in comparison to good news, proxied by negative and positve annual stock returns. His second prediction is that earnings are more timely than cash flow, indicating a stronger association of accruals to conservative accounting effects. Hypotheses three and four account for a test on the