Why honesty is the best policy: “Take eBay, one of the few really successful businesses to have grown out of the Internet. It has a reputation for giving conservative financial forecasts to Wall Street analysts, so they have taken to second-guessing the company and marking up its forecasts. That puts eBay under pressure to hit targets it had not considered itself capable of achieving. Yet if it fails to reach them, Wall Street may well forget that they did not come from the company in the first place.”