Yet skipping the footnotes, and earnings reports in their entirety, is exactly what I would urge individual investors to do. Yes, you read that correctly. I think it’s a complete waste of time for individual investors to read 10-Qs, 10-Ks and other such earning reports for any reason other than genuine interest in a particular company’s operating performance. Note that I said operating performance, not the future movement of that company’s stock price. By the time Jane and Joe Public are reading these documents, the market has already incorporated any new information in them into stock prices. Thus, it’s too late to act on anything they might find.

Read the rest of the article on The Wall Street Journal.

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