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aLkaLiNE on 21 April 2017
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RolStoppable said:
aLkaLiNE said:

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.

Looks like we are in agreement regarding forecasts.

I really don't remember how prevalent articles about Sony's bankruptcy were, but articles are often opinion pieces of people who don't know much about how financials work. Limiting the potential bankruptcy of Sony to the input of analysts though, I don't recall any analysts who claimed such a thing.

The point is that it'd be really really really challenging to prove to a jury that a CEO or other high ranking official specifically wanted to twist a share price based solely on a conservative fiscal forecast (with the intent to over deliver when results are due, so they get a fluffed bonus etc etc)

 

Anyway, here's that article from 2006. It's from a business trading site that actually has a lot of clout in swaying stock prices.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/seekingalpha.com/amp/article/17605-why-the-playstation-3-will-bankrupt-sony

 

From around then Sony started stumbling in a lot of their branches. There's been talks of selling off various divisions through the years, that bankruptcy calculator has been doing rounds (and it's constantly being updated. I saw it hit the >80% chance around 7 years ago, the company has climbed it's way back and now sits around ~%40 chance), tons of speculation, articles every year about them being in trouble, and we saw Sony themselves making pretty big changes in the recent past. The talk has been there. I don't disagree that it's opinion, but a lot of it comes from the business sect. And you'd be hard pressed to find an analyst anywhere that would claim a company is going bankrupt before it actually happens. Claims like that, you can't really back down from and if some analyst said a company was going bankrupt but that analyst ended up being completely wrong it could ruin their career. I don't know how patcher does it.