Simply looking at stock prices to judge the health of a company is at least as narrow-minded as judging the health of a company on net profits.

Lots of companies have a surge in stock prices when rumours of takeover bids surface. Are those companies in fine financial condition?

Except of course that MS has 9 billion outstanding shares verse Sony's 1 billion, which of course is why Sony had a much higher per share value until recently.

Stock price is a reasonably bad indicator as opposed to market cap because some companies like Microsoft are notorious for splitting their stock when the value reaches a certain point (back in the day they reached around $100 a couple times and split to $50), it helps make stock purchases more feasible for regular folks.

Anyhow a lot of the Sony's in dire straits is speculation at this point, in other words you need to wait until a week after Sony releases it's quarter reports to see how the news has really impacted the stock.

Glad to see someone is coming in with some rationality and understanding of how the market works!

Unbelievable... Ok, someone who doesn't apparently understand how the stockmarket works tries to point out how a company with large debt that is going to post large losses, isn't doing any worse than two others without any debt that are going to post profits.

When we have a value in stockmarket and all the shares are going down in the exchange, a single company can't go up if all the others are going down, since all the shares are bind to the stockmarkets index value. Also, the share price is only remotedly related to how well the company is actually performing, since the share value is primarly the market expectations. Even if your company would post record profits, share value can go down, if people expect the company to post bigger profits. Also, shares can go up when a company posts record losses, if it's expected to post bigger losses.

You are telling me that the stock is more important than the earnings reports of the companies? Yes, that's true, but at this point the earnings reports are EVERYTHING. They will decide where people invest and where people will pull out off. So if Sony posts losses, a lot more people will be pulling from Sony than they will be from Microsoft and Nintendo, some in fact shifting to their "rivals." For someone who prides himself on understanding companies and finance you seem to be lacking some very serious common sense....

Not to mention you call people dumb when you don't label your graphs, something that is taught in 2nd Grade...... and then try to hide your stupidity by trying to make others seem stupid.....

Basically to sum it all up, you sir, produced an Epic Fail Thread.

It's Mark Knopfler who's in Dire straits isn't it?

They're stock graphs people...

Edit: oh for some reason only 1 page showed up for me didn't see all the replies except the first page.

Judging a business on one thing be it the balance sheet, share price etc is stupid and doesn't show the whole picture. Sony are in far more trouble then Nintendo and Microsoft for reasons said earlier in this thread. Of course the share prices of the other business's are dropping its called a recession.

Somehow you're very proud of yourself that you understand the market, and blame others for not recognizing a stock graph, yet I never see you in discussions with FishyJoe, NJ5 and myself. You should, there you could also explain why a falling market cap, bad debt position, low capital, razor-thin margins and a falling Yen are actually really good for Sony.

Comparing the shareprices for 3 companies is close to useless, since asset value is included in the shareprice and therefore you can't tell the shape a company is in only by its shareprice.

Sony is not in trouble because of their stocks but because they are likely to report a 1.1 - 2.2 billion dollars loss in their next financial report, the yen is strong and Sony's products have a really low profit margin which is going to hurt them hard.

Sure, gamers are really narrow-minded when it comes to economics...

Edit: The next financial reports for the big three are going to look like that:

Sony: Sorry but we lost a billion dollars... yeah we've overestimated our profits for a decade now but hey... it can only get better!

Nintendo: Our profits have been hurt by the recession but we are still earning enough money to sell our next 5 consoles for a loss of 500$ per console. Each of our employees makes us about 100 quadrillion dollars a day, we think that's quite good.

Microsoft: Unfortunately the recession hurt our plans of buying the whole world. Instead we'll only buy Europe and Afrika this year.

Yeah that's over the top but you get it.