One of the most fundamental factors in pricing and evaluating the performance of companies is their profitability and profit is used as a basis for predicting the future performance of companies. Therefore, an accurate profit prediction is really crucial and decisive. There are various approaches to this prediction. The first approach would be calculating profit according to accounting standards by using historical cost and the second, calculating profit according to fair value. In this circumstance, this question arises that whether fair values are used instead of historical cost, would it lead to a more accurate and better prediction of the company's future performance? The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of using the fair value in calculating profits on the performance of investment companies with the help of benchmarking international financial reporting standards for small and medium-sized units. This research uses the data of 95 companies listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange, whose activity is an investment, from 2015 through 2019 and compares the predictability of fair value-based profits with the profit based on accounting standards in predicting the company's operating cash flows and future profits. The data is first collected in Excel software, then the research variables are calculated and finally, research models are tested and analyzed by Eviews10. The results show that fair value-based profit has no greater ability to predict the performance of investment companies in comparison to profit based on Iranian accounting standards.
