Investment Advisor Alleges MS Financial Fraud

Bill Parish, of investment management firm Parish & Company, claims Microsoft's stock prices may be artifically inflated, and that MS may actually be losing money instead of generating huge profits. Parish says you haven't heard his claims before because "...Microsoft is a significant advertiser in the major media [and] it has been hard to get exposure there." Slashdot offers no opinion one way or the other on the acccuracy of Mr. Parish's allegations. Please read his report and decide for yourself.

Comments

Not really...

[Kaa]

This guy seems to really hate Microsoft...

But what he basically claims is that in Microsoft accounting (and specifically, in stating the earnings) the overhang of the existing stock options is not being considered. That's true. However, that's true for every company in the US that has issued stock options. This issue has been discussed by FASB (accounting standards setting body) several times and after quite animated debate, the existing situation -- that the companies are not obliged to put the outstanding stock options into their profit-and-loss statement -- was left to stand as it is now.

Basically, the situation is like this. Company X issues a stock option to employee Y at, say, $10/share. Let's say a year passed and the stock of company X is now trading at $100. You *can* say that the company sustained a $90 unrealized loss (I am ignoring the time value of money for simplicity) and that's exactly what Parish is saying. However, in the real world if the option gets cashed in, the company will not go onto the open market, buy a share for $100 and give it to the employee in exchange for $10. The company will just issue more stock.

Of course, this is not a painless procedure. The more stock is issued, the more the value of the existing shares is diluted (or "watered down"). If the company has 100 shares outstanding, each share was worth 1% of the company. If 100 more shares are issued, all shares will now be worth only 0.5% of the company, so the previous share owners clearly become worse off.

And that's exactly why the earning figures released generally show two numbers: one for outstanding shares (those that have been issued and are not treasury stock), and one on a fully diluted basis, which assumes that all stock options are turned into shares. It is quite misleading to say that this is a big scam that nobody knows about. Any investment professional understands what "fully diluted" means and that Microsoft does have a huge number of stock options outstanding. That hasn't stopped them from buying Microsoft shares in huge amounts.

Maybe the guy has a point in that the gullible public should be made more aware of the problem (and I freely concede that this *is* a problem: only not limited to Microsoft, not having such huge importance, and not likely to lead to the financial meltdown of the free world). But financial professionals know the situation quite well. And the measures that he proposes against Microsoft are quite ridiculous.

I suspect that Bill Parish at some point in the past shorted Microsoft stock (or didn't buy it, buying instead something else) and is now very very bitter about it...

Kaa