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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JohnNephew" data-source="post: 2757508" data-attributes="member: 2171">Yes, I've looked very closely at the press releases, SEC fiilings, and lawsuits related to many companies.  For example, I made a some nice money short selling eToys stock all the way to zero.  I have a good idea of what I'm talking about.If you're interested in an extended analysis I wrote on the topic of one publicly trading company and their financial statements (a company that was planning to acquire three major game distributors some years back), look up an article I wrote on Pyramid entitled "Due Diligence."  (The deal subsequently fell through, and the would-be acquirer's stock did indeed go in the toilet as I predicted it would, and has never recovered.)I stand by my original point.  Companies describe their performance by many measures, not simply gross sales or gross profits.  It is not wise to read too much into a single performance measure.I disagree.  Companies have totally legitimate reasons to provide performance metrics besides simple profit/loss/gross sales, and providing such metrics to investors or to the public at large is not evidence that a company is "going down."  In some industries, profit is a very unreliable measure of the performance of a company (for example, REITs, where depreciation and amortization have a huge impact on the P&L sheet and distort reported and taxable earnings).As an example, Netflix reports their total subscribers.  In the context of describing their subscriber growth, they might quite accurately say that they are doing better than ever (i.e., they have more subscribers than ever), even if in the same quarter they might have lost money due to the cost of increased subscriber acquisition (advertising, free trial periods, lowering of monthly subscription rates, offering of cheaper but more limited subscription plans, etc.).  Depending on how you view things (and the market exists because people take different points of view),  you might care more about the subscriber growth figure (believing it is indicative of long term trends, and that ultimately more subscribers will translate into more bottom line profit growth), or you might care more about the profit today.  It cuts both ways -- you might sell a stock if subscribers are down (possibly indicating a plateau in growth or market potential), even if profits are up at the same time.If the only thing you heard was "Netflix has more subscribers than ever before," and you leapt to the conclusion that the company had more revenues and more profit than ever before, you would be making a serious mistake.Perhaps you should.  They're easily accessible on the internet.  See if you can find anything concrete about D&D's performance in them.  Here's a direct link to the SEC filings on Hasbro's investor site: <a href="http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=68329&p=irol-sec" target="_blank">http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=68329&p=irol-sec</a>As others have noted, you can file suit against anyone for any reason.  My contention is that D&D's performance is pretty much not material to the performance of Hasbro.  If D&D revenues declined sharply or even vanished entirely, it would hardly register on Hasbro's P&L statements (and in any case it wouldn't be broken out in detail, so we wouldn't know).  According to their last Annual Report, Hasbro's FY2004 revenues were nearly $3 billion.  How much of that do you want to guess is D&D revenue?If this is true, then you don't need to guess how much of Hasbro's total revenue is provided by D&D...they'll have to report it to you.  Just give 'em a call, and report back when they tell you.  If you can, see if they will e-mail you a chart of PHB sales each year going back to WotC's purchase of the game from TSR.Or, as I think is the case, they don't have to report trivial details about their financial results to you or anyone else outside the company -- whether it's how many player's handbooks sold, or how exactly many copies of Monopoly were returned as defective in the 1st quarter of 2005 (to pick a random statistic that they surely know, and certainly has some impact on their financial results, however tiny; but they have no obligation to tell the world at large).</blockquote>

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