The 24/7 Wall St./Flame Index: March 8 Coal Drop Hits Massey

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Bad press about Chevron (NYSE: CVX) rose on news that a federal judge would delay an $18 billion damage judgement made in Ecuador. Rite Aide was hit by poor press as the Supreme Court said it will not hear “pay for delay” drug settlements. JP Morgan (NYSE: JPM) closed part of its European trading desk. One of Massey Energy’s rivals bought a smaller firm. 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

Rank Company Ticker Score Change in Rank Comments
1 Chevron CVX 37.166 +123 More news on $18 billion environment judgment
2 Rite Aid RAD 32.556 +42 Supreme court rejects case that would have protected sales
3 J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. JPM 31.228 +48 Closes important trading desk
4 Target TGT 25.368 +36 Concerns grow over cost of energy and impact on retail traffic
5 Intel INTC 25.289 0 Increased competition from Nvidia in portable device market
6 Massey Energy MEE 24.153 +726 Price of coal drops and rival makes good M&A deal
7 Goldman Sachs Group GS 23.199 +12 Lingering concern about size of legal judgments for derivative instrument sales
8 Toyota Motor Corporation TM 22.904 -4 High gas price will hurt dealer traffic
9 AFLAC AFL 22.813 +14 Lands on Fortune’s most admired companies list
10 Symantec SYMC 22.745 +652 Number of visible cyber-attacks increases.

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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