Wall Street Journal Online Responds to My SSYS Email

click to original Equities Research post regarding Stratasys

Hi Mr. Renna,

My name is Andrew Langhorne; I work for the Wall Street Journal.  I am responding in regard to your request to have Stratasys’ EPS and P/E values updated.

I spoke with our data provider, and the data points, EPS and P/E, will update after the next earnings release by the “new” company. 

Since the “new” company did not release a combined earnings statement the previous values for the surviving company will remain.  The Net Income and EPS values will most likely be different from the current values and the company has yet to state what they will be.

The 41 million shares outstanding figure we are showing online, is the new shares outstanding figure for the “new” company.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Thank you,

Andrew Langhorne

Their full statement is below:

Prior to the merger/acquisition date, the FactSet Fundamentals reflects 

the operations of the surviving entity (Stratasys Ltd.) only as it existed

 prior to the merger; after that date going forward, the data reflects

 the operations of the newly merged entity.  

Therefore, once the new "Company" reports its latest financial data 

the periodic shares outstanding, EPS and other corresponding data

 points will reflect the post-merger information.  

Until this happens, only the "current" shares outstanding 

can be updated to reflect the post-merger data. 

From: Thomas Renna [mailto:thomas.renna@gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, January 15, 2013 12:28 PM
To: wsjcontact
Subject: ERRORS
Importance: High

hi,

on your quote page for the ticker SSYS

you adjusted the shares outstanding correctly to 41 million up from 21 million.

but you did not adjust the eps down fro $0.86 to $0.47

and you would then need to change the PE from 99 to 190

Bloomberg page is wrong too in the same way.

meanwhile Morningstar, Yahoo FInance and SSYS's home page still show 21 million shares outstanding and the mkt cap they show is a mere $1.8 billion which should be $3.4 billion the way WSJ has it.

Someone need to fix all this ERRONEOUS DATA and let the world Know

small investors think their buying at a PE of 98 when they're buying at a PE of maybe 190, maybe even higher

the problem is I know the numbers are wrong , they know the numbers are way wrong but the investing public doesn't have a clue and there are no disclaimers anywhere (including at the company SSYS website).