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The 24/7 Wall St./Flame Index: April 5 The Companies With The Most Bad News
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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 | Southwest Airlines | LUV | 58.047 | 0 | Holes in planes |
| 2 | Massey Energy | MEE | 52.169 | +14 | More mining liability |
| 3 | Transocean Ltd | RIG | 51.796 | +1 | Stupid safety bonuses for management after Deepwater |
| 4 | Kroger | KR | 44.957 | -1 | High prices of groceries |
| 5 | Johnson & Johnson | JNJ | 41.317 | +2 | Market concern about OTC drug recalls |
| 6 | Best Buy | BBY | 38.966 | +9 | Huge data breach reaches its customers |
| 7 | GOOG | 36.728 | -5 | New CEO rattles market | |
| 8 | BP | BP | 35.778 | +3 | Gulf drilling rumor not true. |
| 9 | Capital One Financial | COF | 33.958 | +1 | Epsilon data breach hits customers |
| 10 | Toyota Motor Corporation | TM | 33.562 | -1 | No part, US plants close |
| 14 | General Dynamics | GD | 27.209 | +608 | Gulfstream jet crashes in test |
| 16 | National Semiconductor | NSM | 26.124 | +471 | Bought out by Texas Instruments |
| 20 | AirTran Holdings | AAI | 25.423 | +231 | Gets good marks for service |
| 21 | Symantec | SYMC | 24.779 | +81 | More data breaches make services more valuable. Predicts that world of online security will get more dangerous |
| 25 | Alliance Data Systems | ADS | 23.162 | +141 | Data breach hits Alliance, too. |
Data and ranking provided by the Flame Index.
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