Earnings Before Interest, Depreciation and Amortization - EBIDA

It's EBITDA...but ignores taxes.

Why? Well, maybe something funky is going on with global and/or federal tax law. Like...Apple "resides" in Ireland to avoid taxes. So using this metric, it lets the company tracked compare itself to others in this format.

What if the company just acquired another that had huge tax losses? See: Net Operating Loss.

The taxes can throw off the numbers so that they're not great comps. And you need the comps.