The End of Quarterly Reporting?

Companies are ditching quarterly predictions, worried that they make them miss long-term goals for short-term targets.

In early January, Apple CEO Tim Cook stunned markets when he announced the company would revise downward its quarterly revenue forecast, made just 60 days earlier. Apple’s share price tumbled, bringing the rest of the market temporarily down with it. But that forecast Apple missed, known on Wall Street as quarterly “guidance,” is falling out of favor among many corporations, with some of the biggest names in business pushing for an end to one of the most common ways investors value companies.

For years, supporters of such frequent guidance have argued that predictions can help prepare investors for changes in market conditions or company plans that might affect stock prices. But an increasing number of companies are now turning away from quarterly projections amid growing concerns that a short-term fixation can blind them from pursuing more long-term objectives — a potential weak point for America’s giants as they seek to remain on top of the corporate heap in the coming decades.

Once they’re in, Alex Bernadotte and Beyond 12 are getting underrepresented students through college.

When Alex Bernadotte was in seventh grade, her mom came home one day from her job as a hospital blood technician and in her thick Haitian accent told her daughter, “I know where you’re going to college. Dart-Mouth.” She overheard Dr. Carpino say that’s where he was sending his daughter for college. If that’s where doctors send their kids, that’s where Bernadotte would go too.

Five years later, she fulfilled the prophecy. But Bernadotte’s first week at Dartmouth sent her reeling. Despite having stellar grades and near-perfect test scores, Bernadotte was wildly unprepared. She had even bought the wrong size sheets for her bed. “It was like I had been dropped in a foreign country and left to navigate myself.”

A new threat targeting Mexico could cost consumers and sink markets. So what’s Trump’s plan?

You may think of tariffs as financial policies you were forced to learn about in high school. (Bueller?) But to President Donald Trump, they’re cruise missiles and Reaper drones, critical weapons for getting what he wants from the rest of the world.

Calling himself “Tariff Man” — in a possible bid for his own Marvel spinoff — the president has slapped tariffs on goods from China, the European Union and Canada, and weathered retaliation from those countries. The point is to protect key U.S. industries and, in the case of China, to discourage bad behavior such as forced transfer of technology and theft of intellectual property. So far they’ve been largely targeted on critical industries such as steel and aluminum.

This week, though, Tariff Man went big. Trump tweeted that on June 10, he will impose a 5 percent tariff on everything from Mexico. That figure will continue to rise to 25 percent by October. Why? Immigration.