BTW, Yahoo index referred above is empty

Employers deserve loyalty from their employees, who should leave if they don’t like it. Within legal bounds of course, nothing wrong with whistle blowing on safety/corruption/discrimination grounds, but that doesn’t apply here.

W.

“The final regulation, like the proposal, applies to disclosures of “material nonpublic” information about the issuer or its securities. The regulation does not define the terms “material” and “nonpublic,” but relies on existing definitions of these terms established in the case law. Information is material if “there is a substantial likelihood that a reasonable shareholder would consider it important” in making an investment decision.38 To fulfill the materiality requirement, there must be a substantial likelihood that a fact “would have been viewed by the reasonable investor as having significantly altered the ‘total mix’ of information made available.”39 Information is nonpublic if it has not been disseminated in a manner making it available to investors generally.”

Clearly, there is “a substantial likelihood” that a “reasonable shareholder” would consider what Mark disclosed in his blog to be important.

Further, from Reg FD:

“Under Rule 100(a)(2), when an issuer makes a covered non-intentional disclosure of material nonpublic information, it is required to make public disclosure promptly. As proposed, Rule 101(d) defined “promptly” to mean “as soon as reasonably practicable” (but no later than 24 hours) after a senior official of the issuer learns of the disclosure and knows (or is reckless in not knowing) that the information disclosed was both material and non-public. “Senior official” was defined in the proposal as any executive officer of the issuer, any director of the issuer, any investor relations officer or public relations officer, or any employee possessing equivalent functions.”

And to those who may think, “But, he’s just a regular employee…it’s not like he’s the CEO or CFO,” I offer this:

“An issuer’s officers, directors, and other employees are subject to duties of trust and confidence and face insider trading liability if they trade or tip.”

Maybe it’s much ado about nothing (although, I suspect more than a few hedge funds would disagree), but I’ll bet GOOG ran up some legal fees the last few days.

As I posted in another blog on this issue:

“So, here’s where it gets interesting: was the information too revealing (and if so, the implication may be that GOOG is a screaming buy even at it’s current lofty price) or were they just concerned that he talked about things that shouldn’t have been publicly discussed (perhaps, for regulatory or competitive reasons), even if they were ‘vague?’”

I agree with one of the other posts: he should have paid more attention during the HR briefing.

” they started off the day with a financials presentation, which was actually quite
interesting. of course, i understand that they obviously will put a positive spin on
everything, but the weight of the raw numbers is undeniable. both google’s profits
and revenue are growing at an unprecedented rate even while they are increasing
their expenditures on capital and human resources. not to mention that google has
been primarily focused on the u.s. market and is now turning their full attention to
the global marketplace.

so after the interesting financials, the products team gave presentations reviewing
product performance in 2004 and giving sneak peeks of the products we’ll unveil in
2005. if you guys thought gmail and google groups were cool, you ain’t seen nothing
yet!”

If a URL goes from having some HTMl to having no HTML, does Google still conside rthe URL to have th first set of HTML? Is itpossible that the blogger didn’t even request that the Google cache be cleared but that the cache cleared itself?