OhNoNotimAgain wrote:As usual the thread has veered completely off-topic.
The point I wanted to make was that if you were looking for divine inspiration from detailed examination of published accounts you won't find it for two reasons, apart from the issue of veracity.
One is that there is an army of people doing the same thing and the chances of an information gap being discovered by you are vanishingly small.
Secondly, accounts being published now refer to 2022. At the beginning of that year the world was a very different place, world in lockdown and no war in Europe. Investing is about what happens next, not what happened, 16 months ago.
No one knows what will happen next so invest accordingly.
To a point I agree, but broad trends can still be spotted and do often repeat, the key for me was not to fixate on the last 12 months compared with the prior 12 months but maybe look at trends over much longer periods (say 5 years), if I could be bothered (and the older I have become the lest bothered I have become with wading through accounts)
This often meant holding annual accounts in a folder covering multiple years (you used to be able to order past quoted accounts), wading through and creating excel summaries and devoting lots of time and work to your creations.
Given the sums I was investing back then applying such effort to a "maybe" investment of say £15-£20k was frankly disproportionate (life was too short) so I gave up and moved to the Dark Side (Investment Trusts) and apart from some smaller forays( barely researched punts) into individual shares ( right now circa 27% of funds in Shell/Unilever/BHP/BAT/IMP/Smith (DS)/L & G/HSBC/Bellway/Springfield) I am now pretty happy to just buy ITS and virtually forget about them and just observe the dividends. (They also, longer term, and in the round, tend to do better than my punts)