The Uselessness Of The Fortune 500 (WMT)(XOM)

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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newspaper18The Fortune 500, which has become one of the most useless exercises in business journalism, has been released again. It covers company financials for the year 2008.

In this annual edition, Exxon Mobil (XOM) passed Wal-Mart (WMT) as the largest US company based on sales. Any investor could have made that calculation weeks ago when each company released its 2008 earnings.

According to Reuters, “Overall, earnings of the Fortune 500 fell 85 percent to $99 billion last year. That, the magazine said, was the biggest one-year drop since it began compiling its list 55 years ago.” Any institutional investor could have made the same calculation with historic data and a spread sheet.

The Fortune data is not only old, it is misleading. Market cap calculations are outdated long before the 500 issue comes out. The income data is based on GAAP, which in many cases give an inadequate look at how companies have done, especially if they have had important one-time financial events during the last year.

Fortune insists on printing the issue every year. It would be better off putting it online. At least it could be updated then and be relatively current instead of being a chronicle of ancient history.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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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