footnoted*

Earlier this week, Reuters broke a story about Biomarin Pharmaceutical attracting the attention of activist investor Elliott Management Inc. The news sent Biomarin’s stock up over 10%. As the Reuters piece noted, Elliott has been “in discussion for months” about the company’s future and had spent over $1b amassing a stake in Biomarin. So when […]

All the way back in 2004, there was a moment in the movie In Good Company where the CEO, played brilliantly by Malcolm McDowell, talks about synergy and the young boss, played by Topher Grace, parrots those words with a hand signal. I thought about that when I was reading this press release earlier this […]

I know that I’m an SEC filings geek, but one of the things that endlessly fascinates me are the words that a company uses to describe when someone leaves a company? Was it a resignation? A retirement? A dismissal for cause? I thought about this a bit as I was going through the Friday Night […]

Every now and then, I come across a disclosure that strikes me as being pretty unique, which, given how long I’ve been reading SEC filings, is definitely worth paying attention to. That was the case when I read this 8-K filed by Church & Dwight (ticker: CHD) last Friday evening just after 4:30 pm. In […]

Like a lot of people, I spent a good chunk of the pandemic on Zoom, between my son’s online classes, my own meetings and just catching up with family and friends. Indeed, Zoom stock soared to over $550 a share by October 2020, roughly six months after everything shut down. Since then, however, the stock […]

Yesterday, Meta Platforms, the parent company for Facebook, Instagram, among others, announced yet another big layoff. This time, it was 4,000 jobs. In mid-March, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees to expect 10,000 job cuts and another 5,000 positions that would remain unfilled. Back in November, 11,000 jobs were cut, or roughly 13% of the […]

Less than 10 minutes before the SEC closed on Friday night — Good Friday, in fact, when markets had already been closed for more than 24 hours for the holiday — Capital One filed this interesting little chestnut: Walmart Stores was suing the banking giant to end its multi-billion credit card collaboration. The deal, which […]

n nearly 20 years of reading SEC filings, I came across a disclosure for the very first time last Friday: DraftKings Inc. (ticker: DKNG) paid over $130K for its CEO, Jason Robins and an unspecified number of family members to go to the Super Bowl last year in my (adopted) hometown: Los Angeles. This was […]

We don’t typically write on Fridays because we’re so focused on the #fridaynightdump. But today’s decision by the FDIC to put Silicon Valley Bank (SIVB) into receivership really couldn’t wait until next week. That’s because it’s a critical lesson in what happens when a company fails to disclose something pretty important. I’m riffing a bit […]

The rules (all 24 pages of them!) on when you need to file an 8-K are pretty clear: you need to file within 4 business days of a significant event. Many times that’s often interpreted as a “material event” as in materially important to the company. But that’s actually a much narrower definition and the […]