The most common abuse of GAAP isn&#x27;t Extreme events - it&#x27;s companies excluding some kind of common event every year.  This happened at a company I used to work for:  for 4 years out of 5 there was a &quot;one-time-only&quot; exceptional cost taken out of earnings.  After a while it got silly.<p>This isn&#x27;t extreme good fortune, which would appear in both numbers.<p>It is futile to predict the future.  GAAP is just there to try and make it easier to interpret the past, by applying some rules to compare companies against each other.