Annual Report Size Matters

from the strange-studies dept

Someone at Merrill Lynch was apparently very bored. Instead of doing some sort of useful study, they decided to see how annual report filing size correlated to how well the company actually did. Their findings? The bigger the annual report, the worse the company did. I wonder if investors will start using this as a "tool" in choosing their investments. The reasoning behind it is that longer reports tend to have more footnotes and explanations of problems and writeoffs. My thoughts are that companies with longer annual reports are wasting their time and money and don't know how to be efficient. This would also explain why one of the "anomolies" was AOL-Time Warner which had a huge report, but they're such a giant, that they can waste plenty of time and money and still do well.