SEC Lets Companies Disclose Via Websites, Blogs 71
edadams passes along a note in the ABA Journal that reads "Corporations may now sometimes fulfill their public disclosure requirements under Regulation FD by posting information on their websites and blogs, rather than having news releases distributed by third-party companies, according to new guidance issued by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The move is expected to cut compliance costs." Here is the SEC's policy announcement.
How is archival of this data managed? (Score:5, Interesting)
When companies post announcements via third party media, those announcements are presumably archived. I wonder what the impacts would be of blog-disclosures being retracted or edited after the fact, Ministry of Truth-style?
Re:How is archival of this data managed? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Shock horror! The media might have to do some leg work!
Or just maybe a third party could monitor this blogs and sites, then prioritize and feed important information to the market effectively.
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That's assuming hacking, although you wouldn't even have to go that far. Just make your own look alike blog with your own press releases. People have been duped by Internet fakes countless times... The only difference is that now it'll send a company's stock
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When companies post announcements via third party media, those announcements are presumably archived. I wonder what the impacts would be of blog-disclosures being retracted or edited after the fact, Ministry of Truth-style?
The SEC already serves as a repository of a variety of official communications from all listed companies. Seems to me they are the logical candidate for a centralized clearinghouse of all disclosures. Sure, let the companies post it wherever else they want too, but require them to first send a copy to the SEC who will archive it and put it up for public access ASAP. Make the copy on file with the SEC the official record and leave it at that.
It sure beats the problems that come with 'self auditing' like i
It's a business opportunity (Score:5, Insightful)
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Very likely. That's why for instance, most lawyers have their staff run diff programs between digital copies of contracts that are emailed back and forth between parties.
It's also very likely, that a few companies get caught doing this type of retroactive editing for their financial disclosures. It's trivial to catch, and given enough eyes -- someone is bound to catch discrepancies.
For i
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Couple of years ago I co-founded a SaaS company that provides tools to public companies to manage their web site. What makes our system very unique is that it captures a detailed record of the public web site and allows internal users to "timeshift" to view and report on the site at any point in time. Like the Wayback machine (www.archive.org) but with no time ga
So let's see... (Score:3, Funny)
If one wants other shareholders to get the news, you Dig it.
Talk about moving into the 21st century at a great rate of knots.
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Talk about moving into the 21st century at a great rate of knots.
I'd rather be slow and safe than fast and fucked. :)
Blogs? (Score:5, Interesting)
I can see the case for self-publication of press releases, although that seems to greatly expand the ability of a firm to pull back antiquated information. Hopefully some reasonable protections are taken care of in the forthcoming guidance. I'm also not sure that savings on the order of $100-1000/press release (from the results of a quick Google search - Correct me if I'm wrong) are so significant as to warrant moving away from common, easily indexed third parties.
That said, though, why on earth do they view something as informal and relatively uncontrolled as a blog (or worse - multiple blogs) as an appropriate outlet for this sort of information? This part seems grossly irresponsible.
Is there a draft copy of the changes out there somewhere?
Re:Blogs? (Score:4, Insightful)
A central achieved copy for legal purposes is a requirement to ensure all investors gain equal access to all announcements, the cost in terms of the trillions of dollars invested in corporations is negligible.
Personally I would think it would make more sense to expand the service of the SEC so that they could handle all announcements and third parties could pick it up from there to redistribute or investors can go direct.
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The SEC already does this with the EDGAR database. Every financial statement and major press release has to filed there by public companies in the US. I have a Quick Search set up in Firefox that lets me type "ed [companyname]" into my address bar to bring up any public company's filings.
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http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=JAVA [sec.gov]
Impermanence of websites (Score:5, Interesting)
Would this make lawsuits regarding disclosure more difficult?
For example, suppose company Foo makes a tortuous misrepresentation of the quality of its R&D pipeline on a blog. Then I buy stock based on that. Then the company's lawyers realize the mistake and fix the blog. All within 10 minutes.
I sue, and say that the blog had bad information. They say, "We have no reliable record that the website ever showed that." I curse myself for not having had a Notary Public print out and stamp that web page.
I think this wouldn't happen with the current regime of printed disclosure statements. Could it happen with the proposed system?
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no they still must keep an audit able record of their disclosures. this plus the fact once you put it on the net somewhere it's cached they would be screwed
Re:Impermanence of websites (Score:4, Insightful)
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There isn't any reason for someone with an insubstantial number of shares to ever think that they own part of the company. It makes a lot more sense to think of the money as a loan if you can't do much more than vote in the shareholder meeting once a year.
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In the UK forexample, get up to 30% and you're required to make a bid for the remainder of the company. And umm, what do you think happens when you own 100% of the shares
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Does your rant still make sense if I think that 1% of a company constitutes a substantial number of shares?
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I think so. If you and a few other like minded people each own 1% of the shares, that can quickly add up to some pretty substantial sway over the direction the company takes.
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Yes, that is exactly what I meant. The rant that I responded to was in response to a comment I made about *insubstantial* numbers of shares...
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Or maybe you responded to the wrong comment? Were you really trying to respond to this comment:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=635873&cid=24477973 [slashdot.org]
???
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Re:Impermanence of websites (Score:4, Insightful)
http://spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=13479 [spectator.org] - yes, I know it's the Spectator, but it's a good review of Chris Cox. If you're mad at the government for actually staying out of the way of businesses, you're not being smart with your money. Overpaid CEO's of failing companies are a DROP in the bucket of everything that matters right now, and if that's your sole concern, you're going to lose out at one of the best times to buy into the market in your lifetime.
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It's getting time to sell those Euros, by the way, and reinvest in the American market - the dollar is going to go up over the next year with the fed raising rates soon.
You may want to consider selling soon, anyway, because if Obama wins, the capital gains tax you'll pay on any profit you realize will double....and Presidents only have a minor affect on any economy. We'd have been WAY worse off with some of the
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You're falling for the fallacy that a weak dollar=a bad dollar, which isn't necessarily true. We sell more stuff to foreign markets when the dollar is down - they're buying real estate in drove
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small print ? (Score:1, Interesting)
I allready get the feeling that those (mandatory!) disclosures will be tucked away as some "small print" somewhere, stored in a locked, turned to the wall cabinet hidden behind a door that says "beware for the leopard" which is located in the basement to which the elevator does not work and the stairs are broken.
The reason that the data needed to be presented by a third party had/has a reason. Ignoring that reason is pretty-much criminal.
"It's on the website!" (Score:4, Interesting)
Call me a cynic, but couldn't this be used to obfuscate - or, hell, intentionally hide - information? Instead of being forced to go thru well-known channels, some PR punk could brush off a request by claiming "it's on the website!"
Re:"It's on the website!" (Score:4, Informative)
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Subscribe to Google alerts or similar services for companies and products you're invested in. Within an hour or two of hitting the web you have the information in your inbox.
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All they have to do is flag it so search engines don't index it and they can keep the fine print more hidden than ever, yet say it was there all along.
That's what I was thinking too. In order to do this, the SEC should have added requirements for the robots.txt file, and mandated that the there be a link trail from the corporate home page. Just because the documents are on a web server, and therefore technically on the internet (web implies there are links to it), doesn't mean they are available to the public.
The major players on Wall Street are usually very computer savvy these days (aside from Jerome Kerviel [nytimes.com]). If this plays out like I think it will
What do you mean it wasn't published (Score:4, Funny)
Its not our fault if you don't take an interest in local affairs.
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This helps the small investor (Score:3, Insightful)
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If you buy stock in point 1 at $X, disclose bad outlook in point 2 (presumably driving the price of said stock down to $Y), THEN sell in point 3 you would be selling at a loss of $X-$Y.
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The GP's point is that by selling at 12.01, the obscure web posting has not had time to affect the stock price. You can sell up before the price crashes, but plausibly state that you were acting on publicly available knowledge.
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Whoops! An embarrassing mistake!
Boy is my face red.....and so are my accounting books!
So *that* explains it!
Dear Myspace Friends of Enron (Score:2, Funny)
We is goin' down to Infinitee Nightclub wiv our new legally acquired funds!*
BTW, company totally looking possibly broken.
Drinks at 9, Lines at 7 LOL!
L8rs
Ur G'z @ Enny Ron
The CEO's blog (Score:5, Funny)
Monday
Today I met some people from Company X and it was all brilliant and great. Fabulous news that we are doing a big new partnership
Tuesday
I had pie for dinner
Wednesday
We've just lost $2bn as a result of an internal fraud, the FBI and CIA are now involved and all senior executives are being questioned
Thursday
I'm here in Brazil today speaking with their justice ministry, the weather is fantastic and I'm off to play golf later.
Now Jonathan Schwartz at Sun really blazed the trail here, but surely the really thing for a company to do is have such a god-awful boring blog full of mundane crap that any bad news is "published" in a place that no-one looks.
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SEC filings... (Score:2)
What about the 8-K (Score:3, Informative)
Everytime a significant event occurs the company must publish it on one of the wire services and file an 8-K: Current Report with the SEC. My interpretation would be they would continue to have to file 8-Ks, but they could post the information on the investor website instead of sending it to the wire service. If you are filing 8-Ks, you still have a distinct and 3rd party managed repostitory.
I don't get the concern. (Score:2)
What's the concern over this? If you want to know how a company performed, read the damn 10Q/K. Those are archived here: http://www.sec.gov/edgar.shtml [sec.gov] . Stop relying on press releases as real news.
RSS... (Score:1)
cut costs? (Score:1)