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Companies hide negative news with unrelated press releases alongside SEC filings

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Re: Companies hide negative news with unrelated press releases alongside SEC filings

#51

Post by anigbrowl »

nico wrote: post #10

Will at any point we be able to build a system that won’t be gamed? ie. A system whose incentives are perfectly aligned with its operators and users incentives?

No, but we can make decisions about what sort of losses/abuses we consider tolerable. A simple way to approach this is to just change the calculus of what sentencing terms different sorts of crime should attract. Right now you can operate a bank, rip people off or launder dirty money wholesale, and face only mild criminal liability.

Consider Wachovia Bank, for example, which was found to be laundering cartel drug money at scale. They had to pay a fat fine and the company was force-sold to Wells Fargo amid the financial crisis, but as far as I'm aware nobody spent a day in prison.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wachovia

Re: Companies hide negative news with unrelated press releases alongside SEC filings

#52

Post by rendaw »

gnicholas wrote: post #33

This reminds me of Footnoted*, [1] a site that surfaces useful info that companies hide in footnotes, bury on a Friday afternoon dump, etc. I think there's a weekly newsletter that comes out after the Friday news dump has been picked through. EDIT: found the newsletter [2] 1: https://www.footnoted.com/ 2: http://fnd.footnoted.com

All the articles seem paywalled or stubs pointing to articles on other sources. Do you have any readable examples?

Re: Companies hide negative news with unrelated press releases alongside SEC filings

#53

Post by gnicholas »

rendaw wrote: post #52
gnicholas wrote: post #33

This reminds me of Footnoted*, [1] a site that surfaces useful info that companies hide in footnotes, bury on a Friday afternoon dump, etc. I think there's a weekly newsletter that comes out after the Friday news dump has been picked through. EDIT: found the newsletter [2] 1: https://www.footnoted.com/ 2: http://fnd.footnoted.com

All the articles seem paywalled or stubs pointing to articles on other sources. Do you have any readable examples?

The first link is the regular site, which is what I’ve looked at before. For me, much of the value is just in the headline, which flags the issue so I can investigate further if it sounds interesting.

Re: Companies hide negative news with unrelated press releases alongside SEC filings

#54

Post by gooseyman »

kikokikokiko wrote: post #28

Companies astroturffing bad news is the rule on every aspect of their business, not just sec fillings. An example: down here in Brazil, and pretty much in all of Latin America, CocaCola changed their formula on the classic Coke, reducing the ammount of sugar and mixing it with artificial sweeteners. They started rolling out this change mid 2021, and for someone that absolutely hates the after taste of artificial swee…

I think you mean nerfing in the first line. But I learned a new one I’m going be using all the time now - thank you https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing

Re: Companies hide negative news with unrelated press releases alongside SEC filings

#55

Post by atkailash »

scrum-treats wrote: post #27
breput wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is practically real time: https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?company=&CIK=&type=... also available as an RSS/Atom format feed: https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcurrent&C... There is also a paid-for service called PDS ( https://www.sec.gov/oit/announcement/public-dissemination-se... ) which isn't necessarily any faster but can be more reliable.

Thanks for the links. Interestingly, I noticed Amazon's CEO of Retail, Doug Herrington, dumping sizable amounts of Amazon stock[1]. This activity is coupled with growing complaints about Amazon's quality of goods[2], delivery[3][6] and ability to return those goods[2][4][5][8][9]. Amazon is now requiring customers to file a police report in order for their credible return to be accepted[7][10][11]. Amazon is also can…

[dead]

Re: Companies hide negative news with unrelated press releases alongside SEC filings

#57

Post by nocoiner »

sokoloff wrote: post #42
n2d4 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have idly wondered whether there's an viable opportunity to exploit retail investors who're being manipulated/misled (by, e.g., MSM financial 'news', stock-picker personalities, bloggers, WSB, etc.). Generally, this idea doesn't work because "manipulated"/misled retail investors will still be right 50% of the time. Being bad at trading gets you zero EV, not negative. But if you look closely, those retail investor…

> Being bad at trading gets you zero EV, not negative. I’d have to think a bit more to be sure, but my first instinct is that “bad at trading” would be negative EV given the presence of firms who are good at it. If you enter a trade in the “wrong direction”, you’re much more likely to get a fill than if you are in the right direction. Other errors include letting losers run (hoping to “get out even”) and cutting winn…

Even if we stipulate that “bad” trading is limited to directional bets on the price movement of a security, and as such is definitionally a 50/50 proposition (at least in the very short term - in the long run, every issuer is going to zero), I still think that bad trading has to be negative EV. In the olden days (of five years ago), those bad traders paid transaction expenses. Now they’re just getting adversely selected against.

And there are all kinds of objectively worse trades than 50/50 price bets - leveraged ETFs, short-dated options, buying stock issuances as a company free falls into bankruptcy - these are definitely not positive EV trades.

Re: Companies hide negative news with unrelated press releases alongside SEC filings

#59

Post by brookst »

jonhohle wrote: post #34
thunky wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your links don't reveal growing complaints , they're just complaints people posted to Reddit. Of course there will be tons of complaints, Amazon is huge. Picking out a few of them is meaningless.

Is your Amazon shopping experience better than 10 years ago? Is product discovery easier? Are you confident that you’re getting genuine merchandise? Are delivery promises being met? Are the prices competitive with other online and offline retailers? All of those have gotten worse for me. The fact that FakeSpot exists is telling.

Wait, are we talking about trends backed by data or anecdotes backed by Reddit and n=1 personal experiences?

Re: Companies hide negative news with unrelated press releases alongside SEC filings

#60

Post by brookst »

alfalfasprout wrote: post #47
oxfordmale wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI is going to make a difference here. These filings are often challenging to read for a lay man. However, ChatGPT should be able to have a decent go at mood analysis. Until companies start rewriting their articles to be OpenAI "proof"

there are already several companies that offer machine readable digests. Not sure you want an LLM to do this b/c the risk of it hallucinating is terrifying.

Using hallucinations as evidence that LLM’s can’t be useful for summarizing today is like saying airplanes can’t be used for intercontinental travel in 1980.
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