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This article http://buffalonews.com/2017/03/17/ub-professor-discovers-investors-really-care/ is a review of the new book, "The End of Accounting and the Path Forward for Investors and Managers." After reviewing hundreds of earnings conference calls, the authors have concluded that investors are much more interested in the future than in current returns (traditional measures like earnings per share, etc).
A couple of quotes from the interview with author Feng Gu:
Financial analysts are widely regarded as the most sophisticated investors. They spend their whole life and career tracking the performance of publicly traded companies. Their main job is to help investors understand the performance and the changing risk of each company, so this way investors can make decisions about whether or not they want to invest in a given company.
It turned out the majority of analysts' questions and interests are not along the line of traditional financial reports. So for example, when a company like Sirius XM comes out with its quarterly earnings, the CEO or CFO starts with a quick mention of the earnings per share, which is really one of the key numbers that is included in companies' financial reports. Quickly, everybody forgets about earnings per share and they talk about something else that is not required by the system financial reporting, that is not included in the standard financial reports. ... After reading 200, 300 such examples, we got a very clear sense that investors are not interested in what is included in the standard financial reports. They are interested in something more important, something that is not being reported by companies today.
I think in our book, we made a point very clear that regulators have to require companies to treat investment in their strategic assets as investment for accounting purposes. ... Most of the investment in strategic assets like R&D, advertising, branding and so on, are not being treated as an asset on the balance sheet of the company. They're being treated as just a one-time expense. ... This is the least that regulators can do to correct the information problem that we have documented and other people have documented.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by MrGuy on Wednesday March 22 2017, @12:29PM
Emphasis mine.
The article concludes that, because analysts ASK about things that are not in the published reports, they are ONLY INTERESTED in things that are not in the published reports.
A perfectly reasonable alternative hypothesis would be that financial analysts are sufficiently sophisticated to read a financial report, so they don't need to ask about it - they can read the report when they're done. Instead, when they have time to ask questions to executives, they would ask about things that are NOT in the report, simply because they don't have any other way to get that information.
If you look at what financial analysts PUBLISH, instead of what they ASK, their analysis is well grounded in the reported financials and fundamentals of the companies.