I just got back to the office, checked email and a couple of the feed-readers.
Similar to our 'it could have been worse post' "How Now Dow Jones (Thank Goodness for Charlie Dow) (GE) ", Bespoke looks at index construction in
"GE's Earnings Miss -- At Least It Wasn't IBM"
While the Dow is trading down nearly 1.5% due to GE's earnings miss, GE itself is having a relatively minor impact on the total decline in the Dow even though it is down 12%. The reason for this lies in the way the Dow is calculated. Unlike every other major index, stocks in the Dow are weighted according to their price instead of their market cap. Therefore, the lower the stock's price, the smaller its weight in the index....Go here for the rest of a more lucid (but less literary*) exposition than we managed.
In a like vein, we had "GE Energy solid in Q1...." and the WSJ's Environmental Capital surpassed us with "GE: Energy “Is Going to Be Our Horse”':
Is there a bright spot in General Electric’s dismal earnings report? Jeff Immelt and Keith Sherin, putting a brave face on a grueling day, certainly (still) think so.
“The infrastructure business is the shining star of the company,” said Mr. Immelt, GE’s chairman and chief executive, during a punishing conference call with jilted analysts. A big order backlog in the infrastructure division, including aviation and energy, is GE’s lifeline against even stormier seas: “If the economy gets a little bit worse, we could still accommodate that.”>>>MORE
Finally, MarketBeat wrapped up with:
Four at Four: All GE, All the Time
There was an earlier MB post that we forgot to link to:
...GE has also lost a ton of market capitalization as a result of the selloff. As of yesterday’s close at $36.75 a share, with 10.006 billion in average outstanding shares for the first quarter of 2008, the company had a market cap of $367.72 billion. That’s now declined to $322.09 billion, a decline of $45.63 billion, about equivalent to the total market cap for fellow Dow component DuPont.that touched on the market cap thang. Great minds and all that.
(well two out of three...[see immediately below])
*"Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!
Four shots ripped into my groin, and I was off on the biggest adventure of my life..."
The opening sentence in "How Now Dow Jones (Thank Goodness for Charlie Dow) (GE)"
