Last Thursday, I printed a price-to-book league table; I thought it would be interesting to see how it has changed, two full trading days later. But as I click around the internet from WSJ.com to Reuters to Yahoo, they all tell me that Bear Stearns is trading on a price-to-book ratio of 0.3 or higher, which is clearly false given that the shares are below $5 and the book value is above $80.
It seems that price-to-book statistics aren’t dynamically updated with price information, even two hours after the market has closed. Weird. And so my league table from last week must be suspect too, now – I didn’t double-check the numbers. Sorry. I just assumed in the era of the internet that all these things are automatic; do they really have a person somewhere who manually updates these things every day?