You’ve got to love journalists and their spurious causalities. Today, there
was news
about two analysts’ opinions regarding the Rupert Murdoch bid
for Dow Jones. Edward Atorino, of Benchmark, said that Murdoch
will raise his bid, while Richard Greenfield, of Pali Capital,
said that he will withdraw it.
The only sensible conclusion to draw from all this, of course, is that nobody
knows anything. But wait! Dow Jones stock is down 4% on the day! So clearly,
the market is reacting to Greenfield, as both Reuters and AP
are reporting.
Maybe the market is just reacting to Joe Nocera’s column
on Saturday, in which he said that Dow Jones is "the worst-run media company
in the country," and has managed to stay that way only because of the passivity
of its controlling shareholders, the Bancroft family, who don’t understand the
media industry and who suffer from a chronic case of paralysis.
More likely, the market is just doing what markets always do, which is move.
When a stock is trading on one utterly unknown variable — whether or not Rupert
will manage to buy it — it will naturally exhibit quite a lot of volatility.
Today’s price action is entirely consistent with no market-moving news emerging,
and journalists should think better of attributing enormous power to the likes
of Mr Greenfield.