Du'ers who have degrees or advanced degrees in math, do you think that

[laundry_queen]

8. Agreed.

My corporate finance prof said the best way to really tell if a company is doing well is to read the financial reports from beginning to end, and concentrate on the disclosure comments (some companies have dozens of pages of them, and many investors ignore them). Companies hide a lot of "yeah we are showing ten million in recognized revenue here BUT...." comments at the back.

As you said - a lot of those 'complicated' (they aren't really) equations that are used to project future growth are based on estimates that are also calculated with other equations and other estimates. One estimate is a bit wrong, and those exponential equations go the wrong way, fast. There is a movie I saw (Margin call) that is supposed to be loosely based on the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and that's what it rests on - some employee who is actually a math whiz discovers that their estimate is off and thus they are actually crashing months ahead of schedule (they knew they were in trouble already) and they are carrying far to many toxic assets, but by then it's too late to get rid of them. Anyhow.

So I personally don't think you need to be a huge math whiz, but a little bit of accounting knowledge and a penchant for being thorough with moderate math skills is probably your best bet.