Anyone who remembers the stock market back during the .com days remembers who much juice companies could get out of issuing press releases announcing some meaningless biz dev deal.
Apparently that got to be such a part of the play, that one company issued an apology for not churning out press releases on a daily basis, promising that more would be forthcoming.
Check this out from March 31, 2000:
NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 31, 2000
Track Data Corporation (Nasdaq NMS: TRAC TRAC - Text Reckoning And Compiling ) announced today that after a period of an uncharacteristic dearth of press releases, it will issue releases on corporate developments each day next week.
Commenting on the lack of recent news, Barry Hertz, Chairman and CEO (1) (Chief Executive Officer) The highest individual in command of an organization. Typically the president of the company, the CEO reports to the Chairman of the Board. , said, "I want to apologize to our stockholders and members who look forward to starting their trading day with a press release from us. I can assure you that your management team is continuing to structure deals and identify new business and product opportunities. As I mentioned yesterday in my monthly chat, I am confident that the news releases made next week will be of significant value to our shareholders."
Track Data is a New York-based financial services company that offers myTrack, a fully integrated Internet-based online trading and market data system. myTrack offers the first week of trading commission-free. To open a trading account, go to http://www.mytrack.com and click on the "Open a Trading Account" button.
That comes to us by way of Mike O'Rourke at BTIG who observes that we're basically at the exact opposite right now in sentiment, as people still basically just expect bad news:
Yes, it was that ridiculous back then, stocks did move (a lot) simply on press releases. Today we may have witnessed the opposite in finding out a “New State‐of‐the‐Art LG Billboard in Times Square Designed to Collect and Distribute Only Good News.” According to LG “the overwhelming majority of Americans (83 percent) agree that the United States is suffering from a good news deficit, with six in 10 Americans saying they don't even know where to look for good news anymore.”
Oh, and TRAC? It's still around. Here's a chart. It's down from a reverse-split adjusted 5000 during the peak to 83 right now, trading on the pink sheets.
