Share Price

With his company's stock currently trading below its initial offering price, one contracting executive is declining his 2011 bonus of $100,000. Leonard E. Moodispaw, president and chief executive of Hanover-based cybersecurity firm Keyw, said he opted not to accept the bonus offered him by the company's board — calculated using a formula — to show his commitment in improving share value. "My view of the ... bonus was not that we had a bad year, it was that we did an [initial public offering]

Regarding the March 31 news article " Cuccinelli's Star Scientific shares were disclosed after delay ": Using the financial disclosure information in The Post's article and the related chart, we learn that Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II bought 5,060 shares of Star Scientific in October 2010. At $1.98 a share, he paid a total of $10,018.80. But by the end of 2010 the share price had decreased, so that the value of his shares was $9,867 — below the amount at which Mr. Cuccinelli...

Citigroup wants to escape government control. The Obama administration wants to cut it loose. But investors are still standing in the way. The New York bank said Wednesday that it was on the verge of raising $17 billion from investors toward repaying its federal aid, but only at a price of $3.15 per share, 20 percent lower than the price of its shares at the beginning of the week. That discount was much larger than expected, leading the Treasury Department to postpone its plans to start selling the...

One of the most important things that determine how competitive the economy will be in the long term is how corporations are run: who owns them and how their executives are selected and compensated. In an ideal world, corporate governance would serve everyone well. Shareholders would be able to easily sell their holdings when they needed cash but would be patient enough that managers could think long-term without seeing their share price walloped. Board members would be independent-minded representatives...

Occasionally, we republish blog posts, press releases and other commentaries of interest to the greater Washington business community. This piece is adapted from a post J. Robert Beyster, the retired founder of Science Applications International Corp., wrote for his blog at www.beyster.com . Iwas surprised, as likely many of you were, by SAIC's announcement this past week about the company's plan to split into two independent businesses....

The August 2010 report on a Nevada company called Kore Nutrition Inc. resembled any of countless research reports issued by Wall Street analysts assessing the outlook for company stocks. Written by Cohen Independent Research Group Inc., it was filled with charts and tables of financial data supporting a conclusion that Kore Nutrition "offers an attractive investment for investors seeking growth from exposure to the fast-growing energy drink market. " The report said the stock was trading at 61 cents at the...

Many investors closely watch moves made by Warren E. Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway. Here are some of the significant changes in equity holdings the company made in the last three months of 2009. -- WELLS FARGO Shares held (end of 2009): 342.2 million Change, 2009: +9.5% Share price: $27.37 Change, year to date: +1.4% -- REPUBLIC SERVICES Shares held (end of 2009): 8.3 million Change, 4th quarter: +128.7% Share price: $28.08 Change, year to date: -0.8% -- IRON...

Since the financial crisis of 2008, money market funds have been the subject of fierce debate. Regulators say money market funds need to be fundamentally transformed to prevent them from creating too much systemic risk. The fund industry has pushed back, trying to preserve the utility of money market funds for millions of investors. Fortunately, a smart compromise exists that would reform the riskiest money market funds while protecting retail investors. Money market funds may seem an unlikely object of controversy because they take...

Catalyst Health Solutions, a Rockville firm that manages prescription drug benefits for companies and government agencies, was scooped up by Lisle, Ill.-based competitor SXC Health Solutions on Wednesday in a deal worth $4.4 billion. If approved, the transaction will bring the two mid-size benefits managers under one corporate umbrella at a time when the industry is adjusting to new federal health-care mandates and handling more orders for lower-cost generic drugs. ...

For a brief and bizarre time yesterday, Volkswagen was the world's most valuable company. In normal times, energy titan Exxon Mobil is the world's most valuable company. But these are not normal times. Thanks to a complex series of events involving Volkswagen's stock -- during a time of unique global economic uncertainty -- the German automaker's value topped $370 billion yesterday, besting Exxon's value, or market capitalization, of $343 billion, based on its Monday stock close.

Since the financial crisis of 2008, money market funds have been the subject of fierce debate. Regulators say money market funds need to be fundamentally transformed to prevent them from creating too much systemic risk. The fund industry has pushed back, trying to preserve the utility of money market funds for millions of investors. Fortunately, a smart compromise exists that would reform the riskiest money market funds while protecting retail investors. Money market funds may seem an unlikely object of controversy because they take...

Occasionally, we republish blog posts, press releases and other commentaries of interest to the greater Washington business community. This piece is adapted from a post J. Robert Beyster, the retired founder of Science Applications International Corp., wrote for his blog at www.beyster.com . Iwas surprised, as likely many of you were, by SAIC's announcement this past week about the company's plan to split into two independent businesses....

The Federal Trade Commission has given its nod to Facebook's acquisition of Instagram, voting unanimously to let the deal proceed as proposed. In a press release announcing the decision, the FTC said that it saw no antitrust issues with the deal and will allow it to move ahead. In a statement, Facebook said that it was "pleased that the Federal Trade Commission has cleared the transaction after its careful and thorough review. " Facebook announced that it would acquire the photo-sharing service in...

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said the government should shed its stake in General Motors as soon as possible, even though selling the shares now would lock in billions of dollars in taxpayer losses. "There is no reason for the government to continue to hold" its GM stake, Romney said in an interview with the Detroit News that was published Tuesday morning. Romney accused President Obama of avoiding a sale of the government's GM shares because...

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg's personal wealth has taken a hit, knocking him off the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which ranks the top 40 billionaires in the world. Since his company went public on May 18, the social network co-founder's personal wealth on paper has dropped to $14.7 billion from $16.2 billion, Bloomberg reported after the company's shares fell nearly 10 percent in Tuesday trading. The stock closed Tuesday at $28.84, and was trading slightly up Wednesday morning at $29.33.

In its third day of public trading, Facebook's stock continued to stumble. Hayley Tsukayama reports : The market didn't get any rosier for Facebook on Tuesday, as shares spiraled to their lowest level since the social network went public at the end of last week. On the company's third day of trading, shares closed at $31 , or 8.5 percent off of their opening bell price. Minutes before closing bell,  Reuters reported  that the social network had settled a lawsuit in federal court in San Jose,...

With the financial markets swirling like Hurricane Ike, many investors in the Thrift Savings Plan for federal employees are acting as if they've just chilled in a yoga class and now are taking Rudyard Kipling's advice to "keep your head when all about you are losing theirs. " Although there is craziness on Wall Street, there is no mass panic among the 4 million federal employees and retirees who have TSP accounts, says Tom Trabucco, the TSP's director of external affairs. "They seem to be fairly calm," Trabucco said.

The share price of Sirius XM ( NSDQ: SIRI ) doubled in early trading today, on the announcement that Liberty Media ( NSDQ: LINTA ) would be investing $530 million to help the satellite radio operator avoid bankruptcy. The stock was up to $0.20 from $0.10 within the first hour of trading. The surge in share price suggests that SIRI shareholders were as surprised by today's announcement as most analysts were. The conventional wisdom was that Liberty wouldn't do the deal, and that bankruptcy or a less-than-ideal...

At the close of its second day of trading in the public markets, the Wall Street consensus is that Facebook's IPO was a flop . But it's actually par for the course to see Wall Street and the tech media hype the heck out of something and then tear it apart at the first hint of failure. In this case the hint of failure comes from the failure of the Facebook IPO to "pop" or rise substantially on the first day of trading, giving those who got in on the IPO a quick potential profit.

Facebook's debut on Wall Street last week may have been so-so. But on Monday, it officially flopped. Shares dropped 11 percent from the original starting price. For the social-networking company, which declares that its mission is to "make the world more open and connected," the investors had a pointed response: Put up or shut up. "We're very bullish on Facebook, but the share price just wasn't justified," said Rick Summer, an analyst at Morningstar. "It was overvalued.