Forward Guidance

You're a publicly traded company. You made BobbleHeads with Bluetooth a Thing. Now everyone wants their own custom mini-me.

The 3 investment banks who underwrote your offering "cover you," meaning that they write quarterly reports on how well or poorly you performed financially, and share that with their trading clients in return for soft dollar commissions, more or less.

Each quarter, your CFO confirms or tweaks forward guidance, usually giving The Street the company's own estimates for revenues, cash flow, earnings, and maybe a few other metrics. And then they leave it to the analyst community to figure out if the company "got there."

Did the Somalian division have an amazingly good quarter and that's why everything else was weak, yet the company still made the 17 cents a share in earnings to which they guided? Mumblings galore, 13 weeks at a time.