The 24/7 Wall St./Flame Index (May 17) Companies With The Most Negative Press

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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NYSE (NYSE: NYX) was thrashed as Nasdaq (NASDAQ: NDAQ) and ICE pulled their buyout offer due to regulatory concerns.

Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) was savaged by the press as information from its CEO about its weak quarterly numbers and future prospects were leaked to the press.

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 NYSE Euronext NYX 48.663 +99  Nasdaq pulls plan to buy.
2 Google GOOG 31.344 +1  Concerns about antitrust probes
3 Walt Disney DIS 28.983 +3  Rough earnings
4 Community Health Systems CYH 27.77 +10  Buyout of Tenet dies
5 Amazon.com AMZN 26.884 +23 May pull out of more states because of taxes
6 Hewlett-Packard HPQ 26.296 +773  Awful earnings, preceded by leak of CEO doc
7 Cisco Systems CSCO 26.212 -6  Still worried about future restructuring
8 Toyota Motor Corporation TM 26.212 +9  Japan quake cuts production
9 Eli Lilly LLY 25.092 +72  Amylin sues over drug JV
10 Warner Music Group WMG 24.812 -8  Will be sold off, but at low prices
1 NYSE Euronext NYX 48.663 +99  Nasdaq kills buyout
6 Hewlett-Packard HPQ 26.296 +773  Leaked memo kills shares
11 BorgWarner BWA 24.467 +391  Gets almost nothing from Honeywell patent settlement
21 Stryker SYK 19.764 +620  Moody’s savages over Orthovita buyout
22 iRobot IRBT 19.465 +210  Rough reaction to analyst day

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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