OG>> It was a loss in one trading day. If you were to buy (the whole of) OG>> Intel in the morning and sell it in the evening you would have lost 91 OG>> billion dollars (wrong, of course - you would be a market maker for OG>> Intel then). Think what you may of stock prices, they reflect what OG>> the markets think of how much a company is worth, which is just about OG>> the only half-reasonable notion of value there is. I did not quite OG>> understand the "they decided" in what you wrote - they do not decide OG>> what their stock is worth.
That is not what happened with AOL-TW. From my limited understanding of accounting what happened is that AOL-TW owns a number of other companies, like AOL per se, cable companies, etc., etc. Each of these companies has value (which in most cases to certains degree immaterial and given to various valuations and disagreement, as true value is only known when the thing is sold and that's only the value for that sale) that is represented in 'assets' in their balance sheets. Now let's suppose one of the companies lose its value, either because of stock fall or just because, for example, research that was considered as promising (and thus listed in 'assets') was declared as failed (and thus has zero value and has to be removed from 'assets'). The value of the 'assets' part of the balance sheet is decreased. Accordingly, the other part of balance sheet shoud decrease too, and the part where it decreases is 'revenue'. That's what happened to AOL-TW - it has to subtract from their assets about $45 last quarter and some serious sums on previous quarters, which even with positive operating revenues can lead to serious losses in the bottom line. That also means somewhere at the past some of these sums were probably listed as 'huge profits' of 'new economy dreadnought' and some managers once received fat bonuses for them :) Bottom line - these losses are not directly connected to AOL-TW stock prices, though in part may be consequences of price drops for various companies. P.S. IANAA(ccountant) ;) -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] \/ There shall be counsels taken Stanislav Malyshev /\ Stronger than Morgul-spells phone +972-50-624945 /\ JRRT LotR. whois:!SM8333 ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
