Generally accepted accounting principles require companies to make judgments about various aspects of\ financial reporting. For example, companies make supported judgments about whether to classify debt\ investments as trading securities, available-for-sale (AFS) securities or held-to-maturity (HTM) securities\ (Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) Accounting Standards Codification (ASC) 320-10-25-1).\ Understanding how companies make financial reporting judgments can help investors, standard setters,\ regulators and other stakeholders make better decisions. In this case, we use an analytics mindset to\ better understand how and why US banks are using discretion over their investments accounting, and to\ explore whether recent banking regulations are accomplishing their intended objectives.\ As a review, an analytics mindset is the ability to:\ Ask the right questions.\ Extract, transform and load (ETL) relevant data into a data analysis tool.\ Apply appropriate data analytics techniques.\ Interpret and share the results with stakehold