RolStoppable said:
Not really. I think people who do such a thing can face jail for manipulation of the stock market. Also, outperforming a forecast by 19% is no reason to suspect deliberate lowballing.
The algorithm from your link is the sole reason why articles about possible bankruptcy were floating around. 78% probability to bite the dust within the next two years is such a ridiculous result that the algorithm needed to be dismissed to begin with. Which is what was done when such an article was posted on VGC. Of course you might/will find some crazy people somewhere who predicted bankruptcy for Sony, but those weren't analysts. What analysts would talk about in regards to Sony was that struggling sectors of the company needed to be either corrected or shut down rather sooner than later. Hirai ended up doing that, and while Sony isn't the same company as it was a few years ago, it's definitely in a much healthier shape now. |
You would have to prove malicious intent to put someone behind bars for conservatively forecasting quarterly/yearly results. As in, intent to play the stock market. There's nothing illegal in and of itself for being conservative in your estimates and Im sure that many companies do so.
And articles about Sonys bankruptcy began floating around with the PS3, well before that algorithm in my link was created and posted on the Internet. Sony as a whole lost money for nearly 10 years straight, sold off one or two huuuuge buildings, laid off tens of thousands of workers, spun off some divisions. That article isn't why everyone thought Sony was on the verge of bankruptcy. The clearly bad management from that era is the reason people thought they were going bankrupt. Articles like what I included only exasperated the idea.
