The 24/7 Wall St./Flame Index: April 5 The Companies With The Most Bad News

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
This post may contain links from our sponsors and affiliates, and Flywheel Publishing may receive compensation for actions taken through them.

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 Google 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.

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.

Featured Reads

Our top personal finance-related articles today. Your wallet will thank you later.

Continue Reading

Top Gaining Stocks

CBOE Vol: 1,568,143
PSKY Vol: 12,285,993
STX Vol: 7,378,346
ORCL Vol: 26,317,675
DDOG Vol: 6,247,779

Top Losing Stocks

LKQ
LKQ Vol: 4,367,433
CLX Vol: 13,260,523
SYK Vol: 4,519,455
MHK Vol: 1,859,865
AMGN Vol: 3,818,618