United Airlines Article on Bankruptcy - Article Review

Aarti Patel

Professor Wendy Imel

Case Write up 1

January 24, 2016

The main point of the United Airlines article on bankruptcy was that by not checking the date on the news story, the company stocked from $12 to $3 because of the early warning of another United Airlines bankruptcy. The story was an outdated story when United Airlines first filed for in 2002.  The story bounced back from Orlando Sentinel’s website, then after some time Google picked it up and loaded it to their Google News. Then comes the Florida Investment worker who looked at the story and assumed that United Airlines was going to file for another bankruptcy which then led him to writing a summary and posting it on Bloomberg where investors read this and panicked. They immediately started selling their stocks in large quantities, where the automatic computer selling system kicked in, which is where 30 percent of the stocked get traded, where this then dropped the stock prices from $12 to $3. This left one billion of the company’s wealth to disappear and all happened because no one checked the date on the article.

I think its crazy that the company lost so much money in a matter of minutes all due to one person. If I wrote that story on Bloomberg and because of me this madness happened, I would have felt very embarrassed, and the misery I would have caused United Airlines I would feel so bad, because they just lost all these investors and money. I feel like it is very important to check the data before you write anything and react to anything like that. There needs to be a set of rules when it comes to writing and posting anything online because there is so much false and incredible data out there that people start trusting it and so much more problems arise.

Data is very important to all business. For example, in chapter 13 there was this passage I read that talked about how Wal-Mart demands its suppliers to share with them, so they can be more efficient when it comes dropping prices and seeing what items are selling and what are not. The best type of data you can collect is customer data, because you are assessing the relationship with that customer and you are can better understand the shopping trends, what’s trending, what they like and dislike. This data can help many companies project future income and such. This type of data can help a lot in the long run because it is collected and reliable data, as oppose to finding something on the net and then reading it and trusting it. How can you trust the Internet 100 percent? You cant. When you reference the Bloomberg site, that’s a very credible site and most investors utilize the site the most and keep updated on it so they can make sure the companies they have invested in are running smoothly and there is no problems like bankruptcy or such thing that is going to arise. So overall there are a few solutions /improvements that can be made to the issue of reliable data, and that is collecting data yourself, making sure everything about the article is 100 percent credible, as in the data, where it came from, who wrote it, when was is written it and such. Once you find all of that, I would once again look p the issue and find more articles on it and check if its recent or not so I can see if this issue is going on really or not. If something like bankruptcy is happening within a company, that news is bound to be somewhere else also not just by one person. There is also a technique that I commonly use which is the C.R.A.P. test, which evaluates sources like the currency of the source, the reliability/relevance, authority and purpose/point of view of the story. If all this passes that it is safe to assume the data is credible. There are many techniques you can use and this is my main to go to along with finding articles that scholarly and finding multiple sources to see unbiased responses.