If such difficulties arise with tradable securities, imagine how difficult it is to apply fair value principles consistently to intangibles such as goodwill, patents, earn-out agreements, and research and development projects. Making matters worse, disclosures about how intangible assets are valued must offer only basic information about the assumptions that generated the estimates. It’s hard to see how the situation could improve: One can rarely find an SEC annual report (10K) under 150 pages as it is. If these reports included full disclosure of the assumptions behind fair value estimates—were such a thing even possible—the length of reports would be overwhelming.