I'm of the opposite opinion. While I worked as an equities trader/financial analyst, we didn't move our investments around within an industry all that frequently. When buying, we'd look for a strong sector and then the strong companies within that sector. That's the only major point at which we'd compare between companies within an industry. Once invested, you're not really comparing company vs. company, you're comparing companies against themselves over time in order to evaluate the sector performance. Basically, you have JPM-Q1 vs. JPM-Q2 much more frequently than JPM-Q1 vs. GS-Q1. Non-GAAP reportings typically serve exactly that purpose. It always just comes down to your use-case.