No area of capital markets activity has seen more creativity than the efforts of management, financial sponsors and investment bankers to escape the constraints of accounting rules when it comes to presenting company financial performance. Alternative measures of financial performance, in ever-more exotic forms, abound in company reports, initial public offering (IPO) prospectuses and associated marketing materials, often telling quite a different story from International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS)/generally accepted accounting principles-compliant measures. After several years of following a relatively relaxed approach to such information, regulators in many countries are increasingly clamping down on perceived abuses of alternative performance measures through guidance limiting their use and presentation. This panel will explore the uses, and abuses, of such alternative performance measures from a variety of perspectives – private equity, banking, the buy-side, auditing and legal – and investigate whether such measures actually help attain the objectives for which they are used.