The 24/7 Wall St./Flame Index: April 20 Companies With The Worst News

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK.B) took a big hit in the news as shareholders sued over Sokol trades in Lubrizol. American Electric Power and NRG both pulled bad press over nuclear power facilities. Harley Davidson was hammered by the press because of bad earnings

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 Johnson & Johnson JNJ 56.24 0  Good earnings
2 Berkshire Hathaway BRK.A 36.304 +634  Shareholders sue over Sokol Lubrizol trades
3 Bank of America Corp. BOA 31.831 0  Modest earnings
4 Citigroup C 31.405 0  Poor earnings
5 Community Health Systems CYH 29.549 +1  Legal fight over Tenet takeover continues
6 Transocean Ltd RIG 27.116 +68  Still embroiled in Deepwater disaster
7 Texas Instruments TXN 24.581 +18  Mediocre earnings
8 Goldman Sachs Group GS 23.021 +73  Better than expected earnings as firm shrinks
9 Tenet Healthcare THC 22.835 +3  Fight with CYH continues
10 American Electric Power AEP 22.801 +83  Plagued by nuclear power worries
2 Berkshire Hathaway BRK.A 36.304 +634  Sokol insider trading problems
10 American Electric Power AEP 22.801 +83  Nuclear power fears
14 NRG Energy NRG 21.88 +693  Kills two planned nuclear power facilities
18 Harley-Davidson HOG 20.595 +636  Earnings miss Wall St. estimates
23 Bank of New York Mellon Corp. BK 19.647 +496  Extremely poor earnings news

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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