The 24/7 Wall St./Flame Index: The Companies With The Most Bad Press (7/19)

Investing

Published: July 19, 2011 9:58 am

Earnings dominated the press coverage of today’s shares. Novartis and Harley-Davidson released numbers

Icahn Enterprise was thumped after it made a bid for Clorox, which was rejected. Boeing was hit because large customer American may buy jets from rival Airbus.

Microsoft sold off, probably because of news that smartphone partner is in more trouble

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
11	Alcatel Lucent	ALU	30.207	+209	Former employee charged with graft in Malaysia
23	Microsoft	MSFT	23.309	+176	Wireless partner Nokia in more trouble
24	Icahn Enterprises	IEP	23.063	+543	Market hates bid for Clorox
25	Novartis	NVS	22.934	+530	Earnings up, but generics loom
26	Boeing	BA	22.209	+542	May lose huge American Air deal.
32	PNC Financial Services Group	PNC	20.294	+482	In the middle of ugly robo-signing deal
33	Stanley Black & Decker	SWK	20.061	+466	Buys Sweden’s Niscayah Group
36	Entergy	ETR	19.944	+538	Fight over its Vermont Yankee nuclear plant may cause shutdown
39	Harley-Davidson	HOG	19.879	+632	Earnings remarkably strong
45	Tiffany & Co	TIF	19.219	+610	Oppenheimer raises price target to $100 from $80

Data and ranking provided by the Flame Index.

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