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Comment by rafaelturk | Hacker News Reader

Next step: CEOs to stop attending quarterly earnings releases. IR meetings to become boring, with just the CFO reading numbers.

If I recall: Steve Jobs rarely attended IR events, Jeff Bezos just sent a letter in advance (note: beautifully written), but barely made live comments. Future guidandes are often released as `something between +30% increase or -30% decrease`, meaning useless.

My impression is that nowadays most PRs and releases are already meticulously reviewed. Quite an interesting paradox: The more regulations, rules, controls and surveys are introduced less detailed and exciting releases and disclosures are..

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> Quite an interesting paradox: The more regulations, rules, controls and surveys are introduced less detailed and exciting releases and disclosures are..

Interesting example of what I see as counterintuitive behavior, which brings up a serious question.

If companies are prevented from making anything other than dry financial disclosures every quarter, how is a normal individual investor who is not an insider then supposed to judge investment opportunities?

Personally, I feel like the markets would operate better if companies, big shareholders, etc were always 100% free to make public comments without worrying about the SEC breathing down their neck micro-analyzing every statement. As an investor, I want to hear more from companies, not less.

One option is, ICOs -- they are not regulated by anyone and they seem to be making announcements all the time on Instagram with wads of cash -- I don't understand all this but somehow, cash and rappers are part of the "proof of consuming stakes" algorithm or something...

They can research the products, the market/industry, the competitors. This is where the real information is.

As far as researching competitors goes, it’s tougher to do that if the initial principle exists and companies are all releasing dry statements.

That’s my point. I’d like to hear more forward looking statements of the kind that the SEC frowns on.

What you are saying is in some sense true, but only to a tiny degree. So tiny I'd say it's not relevant. The way to research competitors isn't to listen to the players involved. It's to deeply understand (via research, talking to real users, or becoming a user yourself) the players and their offerings and the components required to deliver those offerings. The players all have a nice coherent narrative about themselves and the competition. It's never the full story and in most cases wildly off.

Step after that: companies have AI represent them in IR meetings, with just the robot reading numbers.

Or companies leverage the AI internally to listen to a report from the CEO - then sanitize it and release it to the public.

kkk lovely. AI full circle

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