Study says companies don't time their earnings releases. Oh, really?

"There is this sneaking suspicion out there that corporate managers sit around their board rooms and try to influence their company's share price by timing the release of their bad news," Magilke told The Salt Lake Tribune. "But we didn't find any smoking gun" suggesting that is the case.

There's just one problem though. The researchers only looked at earnings releases. When you look at other material announcements companies make -- forecast updates, CEO resignations, board of directors shake-ups, and SEC investigations -- I have a sneaking suspicion that you would see a trend of bad news falling on Fridays.

The Salt Lake Tribune interviewed Overstock.com (NASDAQ: OSTK) CEO Patrick Byrne for the piece -- a fact lamented by Gary "I Hate Patrick Byrne" Weiss on his blog -- and got this nifty little quote from him: "They'll use all kinds of corporate pap to try and put a positive spin on their results. They might talk about their pro-forma results and only later in the release reveal their actual results."

Just for fun, here's Overstock's last quarterly earning release: They announced metrics like "Contribution -- a non-GAAP measure" a few lines before mentioning net loss and earnings per share -- and used the phrase "non-GAAP" five times. They used the phrase "Adjusted EBITDA" -- another non-GAAP measure -- nine times. Just sayin'.

The point is this: Public companies find ways to mislead the public and cast their results in a positive light. Whether they time their earnings releases is beside the point. Many roads lead to Rome, and many artifices lead to artifically inflated share prices.