Pro forma<\/a><\/i> in the 1990’s turned into a euphemism for “We just made this stuff up”. But after the dot-com bust and a series of accounting scandals, the phrase pro forma<\/i> turned into a bad word on Wall Street. People swore off that pro forma<\/i> nonsense and returned to the good old GAAP numbers. <\/p>\n But we all knew that that wouldn’t last for long. <\/p>\n
But people aren’t being so cheeky as to use the phrase pro forma<\/i>. No, the magic phrase is now “non-GAAP”. Punch that into your favorite search engine and watch all the people reporting earnings that do not conform to generally accepted accounting practices. <\/p>\n
Let’s see how long before this ruse finally collapses. And how much money people lose as a result. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“Non-GAAP” is the new “pro forma”. Remember the exciting dot-com boom days? Everybody was reporting “pro forma” results. Pro forma in the 1990’s turned into a euphemism for “We just made this stuff up”. But after the dot-com bust and a series of accounting scandals, the phrase pro forma turned into a bad word on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[103],"class_list":["post-32893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-non-computer"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"
“Non-GAAP” is the new “pro forma”. Remember the exciting dot-com boom days? Everybody was reporting “pro forma” results. Pro forma in the 1990’s turned into a euphemism for “We just made this stuff up”. But after the dot-com bust and a series of accounting scandals, the phrase pro forma turned into a bad word on […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32893"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32893\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}