Collins & Spencer
ANY followers of listed companies will be familiar with the concept of ''bad news Friday'', and the suspicion that some companies save reporting poor results until Friday afternoon, just before the market closes.
Leon Zolotoy, senior lecturer in finance at Melbourne Business School, has noted such trends, and for a few months he's been warning companies to avoid falling into the trap of ''bad news Friday'' as investors are on to them.
''My research has found that investors view bad earnings announcements made on Friday far more negatively than the same announcement made on any other day of the week,'' says Zolotoy.
''Investors have learned that firms report bad news on Fridays, so they now consider any negative earnings announcements released on Fridays as important ones that companies are trying to hide.''
According to Zolotoy, the first part of his theory was easy to establish.
He found that, from 1989 to 2006, listed companies ''systematically reported more bad news on Fridays compared to other trading days''.
Working out if bad news Friday had a greater effect on share prices than any other day was more difficult.
Zolotoy came up with a formula that calculates the actual results released by a company against the median of analyst predictions of those results.
That information gives him a basis to compare company announcements during the working week and then observe the effect on the share price. The result? ''No doubt, Friday is the worst day to release bad news,'' he told Collins & Spencer.
"Over time, investors have learned about the tendency to release bad news on Fridays, and bad news is viewed far more negatively than it needs to be if it is released on a Friday. Stock prices have become more sensitive to Friday announcements, so the strategy of hiding 'bad' news on Friday misses its target.''
For the birds
A BANK manager plunging into the Yarra River is a sight many home owners would love to witness.
David Hyde, Westpac's general manager of retail and business banking, took just such a dive over the weekend, as an entrant in Moomba's famous Birdman Rally.
Hyde (pictured above) got quite a welcome from the MC of the event, one of the Scared Weird Little Guys comedy duo, who said: ''You should have attached your plane to interest rates, then it would keep rising.''
Hyde laughed, and so did the crowd. Sadly, there wasn't as much crowd feedback when Hyde told them if they chanted ''West-pac'', the bank would double its donation to charity.
It seems Birdman fans aren't very corporate types, with barely a handful joining the chorus.
Express post
HE'S only been back in town a couple of months, but the nation's new postmaster, Ahmed Fahour, is getting about town in quite a set of wheels.
The chief executive of Australia Post was spotted cruising in a flash Audi near Reservoir on the weekend.
Sadly, while our correspondent knows his bankers, he's not a keen viewer of Top Gear: ''Don't know exactly what model, but it was a shiny black Audi, and he wasn't too far from the local post office.''
Communications game
AFTER 15 months amid the chaos of BrisConnections, the company's communications manager, Patrick Southam, is packing his bags and heading home to Sydney.
Southam joined BrisConnections just weeks after Nicholas Bolton took a stake in the embattled toll-road builder, replacing leaky PR ship FD Third Person. He has spent two weeks in Brisbane each month, away from his family.
''Patrick has been an invaluable part of the team during what has been by any measure a most tumultuous and demanding start-up for BrisConnections,'' chief executive Ray Wilson told staff.
Wilson is expected to take on Southam's responsibilities.
The final auction of part-paid BrisConnections units, at a reserve price of $1, took place yesterday. There were no bidders.
