[rapht]

All companies cook their earnings to a certain extent, exactly in view of having a nice, regular, consistent performance... because markets over-react (in one way or another) to anything that is not nice, regular, consistent.

The only thing not subject to interpretation is cash, but you have kind of the reverse problem: most of the time, it's difficult to intepret anything from it... of course, that's why modern accounting was invented. As we say in French: c'est le serpent qui se mord la queue (the snake's biting its own tail).