The writer is a managing director at Frontline Analysts and author of “The Unaccountability Machine”
When IBM realised recently that AI was changing corporate IT spending in not a good way for its mainframe business, it did the right thing.
Rather than waiting for the next set of quarterly results to give investors the bad news, it filed an immediate report known as an 8-K, warning on its earnings. Although it might not have felt great for shareholders, who suffered a 25 per cent loss following the news, this was much better than allowing a false market to exist with investors buying or holding shares unaware of the coming bad news.