In A Word: Underperforming

Keep in mind the New York Times sold off its television holdings to pay off debt some years back. Meanwhile, News Corp bought the Wall Street Journal.

With word of Morgan Stanley selling off its New York Times stock holdings, roughly 7 percent of available stock, I thought it might be fun to look at a five year average of the Times versus the indexes, as well as News Corp - News Corp in red, Times in blue - screen cap below. I think the word the editors might be looking for is underperforming.

Oct. 17 (Bloomberg) — Morgan Stanley, the second-biggest shareholder in New York Times Co., sold its entire stake today, according to a person briefed on the transaction, sending the stock to its lowest in more than 10 years.

The person declined to be identified because Morgan Stanley hasn’t made the sale public yet. Traders with knowledge of the transaction said Merrill Lynch & Co. sold New York Times stock worth $183 million in a block trade.

Comments

[sherlock]

That is a non-linear scale, too, folks, so where it looks as though News Corp goes up about as much as NYT goes down, it has actually gone up twice as much as NYT went down. It doesn't look like a logarithmic scale, but it is definitely not linear.

[Captain Joe]

What idiot bought that stock?

[Wild Bill]

What idiot bought that stock?

Pinch!

[CP]

You mean a logarithmic scale. Every 10-fold in increase or decrease from absolute Zero gets smaller if you put a ruler on the paper to measure it. It can be very deceiving if you casually glance at charts and graphs.

But on the bar graph, someone did in fact drop ~15 mil of NYT stock, and the others did in fact go up between 50 and 100%. Logarithmic graphs are used to graph large changes in numbers of anything and still fit them on the graphs.