Nhưng bạn có thể học được một nhà đầu tư nhiều thông tin hơn và tìm hiểu làm thế nào để tránh đầu tư vào các công ty đẩy phong bì kế toán. Thậm chí nếu nó sẽ đưa bạn một thời gian để chọn những kỹ năng ngôn ngữ mới, rất có thể là bạn sẽ có thể tại chỗ một số | Financial Fine Print Any type of new footnote or disclosures from year to year or quarter to quarter should stick out like a sore thumb. Ask yourself why the company has decided to share this information now. While Enron s related party transactions footnote was by far the biggest warning sign pros say that other things also stood out in Enron s filings. For example in Note 12 on pension obligations Enron disclosed that it was using a percent rate of return for its pension assets. Accounting rules say that it s perfectly legal for companies to make their own assumptions here. But for a pension fund with hundreds of millions of dollars in it Enron s stood at 853 million at the end of 1999 even an extra half of 1 percent could add millions to the company s income statement. For a more complete discussion on pensions see Chapter 7. That s one of the reasons why professional money managers like Chanos and Olstein who read 10-Ks on an almost daily basis say that pension footnotes can be a strong and relatively quick signal to individual investors as to whether a company is engaging in aggressive accounting. Olstein for example says that when he started to read Lucent Technologies 10-Ks for 1997 and 1998 he noticed what he considered to be a significant amount of the company s revenues coming from employee pensions. As it turns out that wasn t the only area where Lucent was being overly aggressive. Poking around a bit more Olstein saw that Lucent was using reserves to pump up earnings and that receivables and inventories Actually the percent rate was disclosed in a footnote to the pension footnote in Enron s 1999 10-K filing. 26 Reading the Fine Print Like a Pro were growing faster than sales prompting him to short Lucent stock an investing strategy he does relatively infrequently. The pension assumption tells you something about the management s conservatism or lack thereof says Chanos who also believes that 6 percent is an appropriate rate of return. Indeed .
