david f. zucker
News
12:00PM Logan Booker | We all know Midway isn’t doing so well. A couple of bad games (okay, maybe a lot), accusations of insider trading (oh dear) and the closing of several studios (RIP Ratbag) have left the company in a bit of a spot.
It also doesn’t help that its stock has gone from a healthy $US 22 in mid-2005 to the anorexic $US 4 price it wallows in now.
A couple of days ago Pandemic coder Tony Albrecht made a post on his blog, Seven Degrees of Freedom, detailing how Midway ended up in the position it’s in. It’s mostly to do with the company’s CEO, David F. Zucker and his stock market dealings.
Albrecht does an excellent job of breaking Zucker’s story down into neat, digestible facts:
Every available day (excluding weekends and Xmas and New Years) Zucker would buy 50,000 shares at a discounted price (about half the going rate) and then sell them immediately. You can see the full details here and the graph above gives you an idea of the amounts involved – black is earnings, and red is expenditures. All in all, Mr Zucker ended up with about $8.5Million in his pocket.
It almost smells like an intricate pump and dump scheme. Just replace the dodgy pharmaceuticals with crappy games. More »
Tony Albrecht: Midway’s A Sinking Ship
12:00PM Logan Booker | We all know Midway isn’t doing so well. A couple of bad games (okay, maybe a lot), accusations of insider trading (oh dear) and the closing of several studios (RIP Ratbag) have left the company in a bit of a spot.
It also doesn’t help that its stock has gone from a healthy $US 22 in mid-2005 to the anorexic $US 4 price it wallows in now.
A couple of days ago Pandemic coder Tony Albrecht made a post on his blog, Seven Degrees of Freedom, detailing how Midway ended up in the position it’s in. It’s mostly to do with the company’s CEO, David F. Zucker and his stock market dealings.
Albrecht does an excellent job of breaking Zucker’s story down into neat, digestible facts:
Every available day (excluding weekends and Xmas and New Years) Zucker would buy 50,000 shares at a discounted price (about half the going rate) and then sell them immediately. You can see the full details here and the graph above gives you an idea of the amounts involved – black is earnings, and red is expenditures. All in all, Mr Zucker ended up with about $8.5Million in his pocket.
It almost smells like an intricate pump and dump scheme. Just replace the dodgy pharmaceuticals with crappy games. More » 
