As the carrier announced a 66% rise in firstquarter profit to 115.7m last week, some investors were left wondering why the outlook remained so conservative.

Chief executive Michael O'Leary (right) said that the low-fares operator may be unprofitable in the fourth quarter because of fuel costs and competition. Management said it would be able to give additional guidance at the end of its first half.

That hasn't been enough to quell frustration among some analysts . . . tiring, perhaps, of what may sound like a company crying wolf. Things are going to be tough. And then, glittering results.

"The market is frustrated with the guidance, " said Penny Butcher, an analyst at Morgan Stanley in London with an 'overweight/cautious' rating on Ryanair shares. "The results are excellent, but the outlook seems stupid."

Perhaps it does, yet, as Joe Gill of Goodbody Stockbrokers points out, it's very difficult for either analysts or Ryanair management to look further than eight to 10 weeks into the future when contemplating airlines. "Anything further than that and you can be sticking your finger in the wind, " he said.

As such, the conservative outlooks and sometimes even vagueness can be, at least partly, understood.

But take a glance back in time and there may well be another reason. At the beginning of 2004, Ryanair issued its first . . . and, so far, only . . . profit warning, saying that profits could fall 10%. For a company used to impressing, it was like bringing home a bad school report.

Investors were distraught. The stock plunged 30%. The results that January also came at a time when the European Commission was investigating whether Ryanair had received illegal state subsidies at its Belgian hub in Charleroi. That profit warning experience is thought to have dismayed management to the extent that, from then on, conservatism would be the order of the day.

Chief financial officer Howard Millar disputed that the latest outlook is too conservative. "Listen to me very carefully, " he told reporters in London last week. "There will be a modest increase in average fares in the second quarter, and there are still many uncertainties about the winter."

But the forecasting game may yet end.

Less than two weeks ago, the US CFA Centre for Financial Market Integrity and a branch of the powerful US equivalent of Ibec, the Business Roundtable, called for an end to quarterly guidance figures from quoted companies.

The two groups argue that such guidance betrays an obsession with short-term goals and fails to provide longer-term shareholder value.

"The obsession with short-term results by investors, asset management firms and corporate managers collectively leads to the unintended consequences of destroying long-term value, which decreases market efficiency, reduces investment returns and impedes efforts to strengthen corporate governance, " according to a report issued by the two bodies.

Being released from the burden of providing quarterly guidance surely sounds like a dream come true for management at quoted companies.

But what about investors?

"There's a huge risk that you'd end up with misinformation about company performance, " said Joe Gill. "You could end up with a false market of information."

But Dean Krehmeyer, executive director of the Business Roundtable Institute for Corporate Ethics, makes an interesting point.

"Short-termism, " he said, "cuts across an enterprise and results in management actions . . . including reductions in research and development, and the foregoing of strategic investments . . . all in order to make the quarterly number."

While the call for an end to quarterly reporting has some definite merit, don't expect it to happen any time soon. At least if investors have anything to do with it.