The 24/7 Wall St./Flame Index: Goldman Hit By Legal Fees, Blackrock M&A

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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For reasons that are hard to understand, Noble Energy (NYSE: NBL) was hit with a wave of bad news after it announced that the company had received a permit drill in the Gulf of Mexico. Perhaps environmentalists are unhappy. Blackstone (NYSE: BX) bought Centro Properties (NYSE: CNP) for $9.4 billion. The market must believe the price is too high. Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) announced that it could lose $3.4 billion in legal settlements over securities is underwrote.

Note: The Flame Index scans thousands of news sites 24 hours per day and ranks companies getting the most negative press right now. The Flame Index Media Analysis Algorithm crunches the data for an up-to-the-minute ranking of the hardest-hit companies.

The Flame Index started as a research tool in 2008 at the NY Innovation Design Lab (nyidlab). It was used as a general metric to evaluate companies and their risk in the media. Publicly traded Fortune 500 companies are used as a measure to calculate an overall market of negative news and the companies are ranked within that market.

Douglas A. McIntyre

 

Rank Company Ticker Score Change in Rank Comments
1 Noble Energy NBL 31.866 +433 Gets approval for Gulf drilling
2 Itron ITRI 30.432 -1 Lawsuits after bad earnings
3 Wells Fargo WFC 28.509 +7 Legal costs from 2008 crisis
4 American International Group AIG 27.301 +10 S&P downgrade insurance unit of company
5 Duke Energy DUK 27.141 +6 May buy in to SC nuclear sites
6 AFLAC AFL 25.132 +9 Files 10-K
7 BlackRock BLK 24.746 +191 Buys Centro for $9.4 billion
8 Forest Laboratories FRX 24.208 -5 Clinical Data buyout gets no support
9 Goldman Sachs Group GS 23.803 +731 Announces legal settlements could cost $3.4 billion
10 Helix Energy Solutions Group HLX 23.293 -5 Oil containment systems may be deployed in Gulf

Data and ranking provided by the Flame Index.

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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