GAFFE BURNS SYNCOR STOCK WEB ERROR COSTS MILLIONS.Byline: Jason Z. Cohen cohen or kohen (Hebrew: “priest”) Jewish priest descended from Zadok (a descendant of Aaron), priest at the First Temple of Jerusalem. The biblical priesthood was hereditary and male. Staff Writer WOODLAND HILLS - Call it a case of mistaken identity - a $34 million case. An erroneous report on the Briefing.com Internet site Monday had Syncor International's stock downgraded by a J.P. Morgan analyst. Only problem is, J.P. Morgan doesn't follow Syncor. The stock lost 6.44 percent of its value, even after Syncor issued a press release saying the report was an error and had been corrected. The actual company that had been downgraded was SCOR SCOR Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research SCOR Supply Chain Operations Reference model SCOR Small Corporate Offering Registration SCOR Specialized Center of Research (White Plains, NY) SCOR Second Cousin Once Removed , a French insurance company whose name happens to match Syncor's ticker symbol Ticker Symbol An arrangement of characters (usually letters) representing a particular security listed on an exchange or otherwise traded publicly. When a company issues securities to the public marketplace, it selects an available ticker symbol for its securities which investors . SCOR's U.S. shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) World's largest marketplace for securities. The exchange began as an informal meeting of 24 men in 1792 on what is now Wall Street in New York City. under the symbol SCO (The SCO Group, Lindon, UT, www.sco.com) A leading vendor of Unix operating systems for the x86 platform. SCO had also offered Linux, but abandoned the line in the spring of 2003. The SCO Group is the combination of two companies: Utah-based Caldera, Inc. . Greg Jones, Briefing.com's director of research, said the company received its report from J.P. Morgan identifying the downgraded company as SCOR. Since Briefing.com usually receives its reports as ticker symbols, it reported Syncor as the subject of the downgrade, he said. ``It was our fault in misinterpreting it,'' Jones said. Briefing.com's reports are repeated on the financial news service of Yahoo.com, one of the Internet's most popular financial information services See Information Systems. , as well as those of Microsoft and Quicken. In all Monday, Woodland Hills-based Syncor lost $34 million in market capitalization, the measure of a company's total stock market value. Its shares closed at $41.75 per share, a drop of $2.88 per share. Jones said the mistake was an honest one, and it was corrected as quickly as possible. Syncor makes radioactive ``seeds'' used to target and treat tumors and has a medical imaging business operating under the name Comprehensive Medical Imaging Inc. Syncor's international division provides nuclear pharmacy services, medical imaging and radiotherapy. |
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