The annotated SCO stock price chart

[Posted March 10, 2004 by corbet]

The following chart shows the price of the SCO Group's stock for the last year, correlated with various events which took place over that time.

[SCO chart]

Credits: price data is from Yahoo Finance; basic chart done with Ploticus; annotations done with Dia.

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The annotated SCO stock price chart

Posted Mar 10, 2004 16:50 UTC (Wed) by vblum (guest, #1151) [Link]

Beautiful!

Remarks:
1) Now is there a correlation with events, or is it wishful thinking?
2) Would be nice if the recent downward trend were really an intelligent reassessment of the situation, and not just a momentary dent.

The annotated SCO stock price chart

Posted Mar 10, 2004 18:07 UTC (Wed) by jre (guest, #2807) [Link]

It's possible that the downward adjustments of this year's and next year's earnings-per-share estimates may have had something to do with this week's slide.

The annotated SCO stock price chart

Posted Mar 10, 2004 17:21 UTC (Wed) by parimi (guest, #5773) [Link]

The chart looks superb! Can you please tell me which tool was used to generate this ?

Tools

Posted Mar 10, 2004 17:26 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

It's all listed below the chart: data from Yahoo, chart with Ploticus, annotations with Dia.

Tools

Posted Mar 10, 2004 17:32 UTC (Wed) by parimi (guest, #5773) [Link]

Yes, Sorry I missed that. Guess I got carried away on looking at the chart.
Thanks!

The annotated SCO stock price chart

Posted Mar 13, 2004 4:28 UTC (Sat) by bronson (guest, #4806) [Link]

The content of the chart is superb. Well done, author! (I assume Corbet). This is the sort of article that makes me very happy to be a LWN subscriber.

The presentation, however, looks awful. The fonts are ugly and poorly scaled. The linedraw is terrible. There are no gridlines so it's hard to read values near the middle. Did I mention the fonts? It looks straight out of the 80s. Ploticus is good for generating simple realtime plots but its output is definitely not print quality.

I can recommend Gnumeric -- it's an amazingly capable spreadsheet with good plotting. You could also use GnuPlot to generate PostScript (then render with GhostScript and mark up with Dia).

The annotated SCO stock price chart

Posted Mar 10, 2004 17:40 UTC (Wed) by rjamestaylor (guest, #339) [Link]

Very nice. Nothing like a drop of SCOX to cheer the soul!

I kind like the RHAT vs SCOX 1 year comparison, too.

The annotated SCO stock price chart

Posted Mar 10, 2004 22:42 UTC (Wed) by dlapine (guest, #7358) [Link]

The 6 month comparison is so much clearer:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=SCOX&t=6m&l=on&z=m&q=l&c=rhat

The annotated SCO stock price chart

Posted Mar 10, 2004 22:44 UTC (Wed) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]

I prefer the linear-scale 6-month comparison

SCO stock price data

Posted Mar 10, 2004 19:05 UTC (Wed) by danielpf (subscriber, #4723) [Link]

It would be nice to have the most detailed data of SCOX openly available on the net, in a kind of financial groklaw site. Eventually the collective intelligence with statistical skills out there would disclose interesting correlations in this stock, perhaps proofs of manipulations, who knows?

The annotated SCO stock price chart

Posted Mar 11, 2004 10:21 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

I find myself wondering what tripped the share price rise around Oct 1 last year; it's the only unannotated inflection point on the graph. :)

Also note that since January, SCO's own statements seem to have led to the stock price falling, while actions that restrict SCO's freedom of action, like BayStar getting the ability to muzzle SCO's lawyers, has made the price rise. Last year, SCO's statements seemed to lead to price rises no matter how ridiculous they were, or how comprehensively they were rebuffed: e.g. the price surge at the quickly crushed SCOsource code showing.

At the risk of stating the bleeding obvious, somehow I think this indicates that investors aren't as confident in SCO as they used to be, and perhaps are even starting to think for themselves for a change.

But no. That will surely never happen. :)

The annotated SCO stock price chart

Posted Mar 24, 2004 7:03 UTC (Wed) by piskozub (guest, #14877) [Link]

The two events that created biggest upward jumps in SCOX price were optimistic SCO earning estimates by an analyst (namely Brian Skiba of DB). One of them was October 15 (I believe it was Skiba, not Baystar which triggered it, at least as the direct cause: he might have known about Baystar earlier than the rest of the market). I'm not sure about the other date but I'm sure that can be checked on Groklaw.

The annotated SCO stock price chart

Posted Mar 26, 2004 0:20 UTC (Fri) by jslyster (guest, #17170) [Link]

I can't help but notice that SCO's chart looks roughly like a parabolic arc if you smooth out the lines. That's the kind of arc anything flung through the air follows. Like, say, an artillery shell.

So taking this analogy one step further, it looks like SCO has been shot from a cannon. Darl and the boys seem to be enjoying the ride with the wind in their faces, but when they land there's going to be a big BOOM and a crater.