Not what you may have expected!

The following article will appear in shortened form in the Australian Financial Review form on Monday online and perhaps in print on Wednesday, presuming it makes the editors cut.

Reporting season for FY23 is over with its usual hit and misses. While results have been assessed against their expectations and significant reporting disseminated, often it is not until some time after when companies can be benchmarked against one another that we can measure how they actually stack up against perceptions.
Being specific, investors, analysts and the market can often have a perception of business in the lead up to their latest report. Is it Good? Cheap? Hot? Or Not?. But once we have a chance to analyse their numbers and benchmark them against their peers, all perceptions are just that. And once we are able to assess and benchmark the Factors that drive a stock's returns, we often have results presented to us that make us double check our biases, to the positive and/or negative.
Below is a list of stocks that have been assessed and benchmarked following this Reporting Season whose results did not match previous perceptions. Looking into the numbers of a company is...