The 24/7 Wall St./Flame Index: Companies With The Worst Press (6/9)

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.

Nokia was badly hurt by poor earnings and rumors of a takeovers. CVS suffered from a report by Fox Business the organized crime has hurt retail margins. EMC division RSA suffers major hack data breach.

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
10 FedEx FDX 22.261 +47  Hikes dividend
22 Nokia NOK 19.408 +716  On the ropes. Buyout rumors
25 CVS Caremark CVS 19.128 +704 Fox Business points to organized crime problems
28 Aetna AET 18.489 +307  Forecasts soft quarterly numbers
35 Manpower MAN 17.527 +59  Struggles in China market
39 Universal Health Services UHS 17.256 +53  Reaction to presentation at Goldman analyst conference
42 Sara Lee SLE 17.081 +104  Nestle launches competing products
46 EMC EMC 16.704 +104  RSA division has huge data breach
48 Symantec SYMC 16.232 +357  Hackers undermine confidence in online securities firms
50 Amgen AMGN 16.171 +363  Teva will launch competing product

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