The 24/7 Wall St./Flame Index: Companies With The Worst Press Coverage (6/16)

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Homeowners get clobbered in the press as the housing depression worsens.

Hackers hit ADP servers and worry grows about safety of payroll data.

Market revolt about Target 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
8 Automatic Data Processing ADP 27.893 +167  Hackers hit its servers
9 Comerica CMA 27.12 +82  New capital ratios could hurt earnings
15 Morgan Stanley MS 25.317 +334  Worries about position in Greek debt?
28 Oracle ORCL 21.623 +197  Sued by HP about an “unfair” use of software
33 Hewlett-Packard HPQ 20.7 +580  Sues Oracle over software use
37 Target TGT 19.498 +329  Earnings were nothing special
39 Gap GPS 18.724 +506  Skepticism about move into Europe
41 Lennar LEN 18.22 +150  Home builders say market is more deader than before
44 Toll Brothers TOL 18.08 +234  Ditto
45 Smithfield Foods SFD 18.07 +396  Nice earnings but high capex

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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