Of course, this also makes her a witness to Will aiding and abetting the escape of a potential felon…as well as a co-conspirator. It was a dumb way to manage that.
Meanwhile, I wonder if the dumb siblings remembered to file the necessary SEC statement that they had purchased 5% or more of a public company’s stock?
Sunday’s episode wasn’t as strong as the first two, IMO, but still pretty good.
I kept expecting the EPA guy to quit on the air, or show signs of a nervous breakdown, or something. His continued calm, rational presentation made it much, much, creepier. 
Agreed. If they never do anything else on the show but that, it will have been a triumph, in my opinion.
Nothing the EPA guy said was news to anyone who’s been paying attention, but it really was watching the news as I would (wishfully, stupidly) want it to be reported.
Yeah, for me all three seasons were absolutely worth it just for that scene alone.
My favorite bit was at the very end, when Will says thanks for coming in, his “Thanks for having me!” is just so chipper. Perfect delivery.
On the one hand I assume they’re using a stockbroker, accountant and wealth management business to handle their day to day dealings and not just sitting at home doing this on their iPhones with an eTrade account while watching TV. In that case all the SEC stuff should be taken care of if it needs to be filed.
OTOH, Sloan’s super computer, which she’s talked about 15 times certainly would have picked up on that. But maybe she doesn’t watch the news for her own company, why would she, she’s no doubt not allowed to trade it. However, the higher ups shouldn’t have noticed them gobbling it up much earlier on.
How long does it typically take for a company to recognize a hostile take over?
As long as Alison Pill is in the cast, I cannot watch.
Well, maybe its not her. Maybe it’s just the way that annoying character is written. Still, cannot watch.
This was such a great scene. And I liked that Maggie was having a plot rebound which, on any other show, would have ended in a final triumph…instead, it ended in WTF.
It turns out they actually have 10 days after the fact to make a 13D filing, so they’re probably okay (unless there’s some nuance of SEC regs I missed). But yes, it shouldn’t have taken Sloan and her Magic Computer to recognize the ramp-up in buying.
Of course on the other other hand, it was Sloan and her super computer that spotted it. She’s the one that pointed out that even though their earnings were down, their stock price was up. Of course any one could see that and anyone as smart as her could probably figure out that it means something was going on, possibly a takeover. Her super computer really didn’t play into it, a regular computer, even without a brokerage account can watch the prices fluctuate just as well. But the point remains, I guess we should give her credit. She’s is actually the one who caught it.
Nitpick: The “super computer” being referred to was just a Bloomberg terminal. The big thing that it gets you is real-time stock quotes and access to news feeds.
I thought it was Savannah that was buying the 5% now. Then when the twins were vested, they planned to sell their stock to Savannah.
True. That said, I’m bugged more on reflection by this than I was when I first watched. Having worked high up in an Extremely Large Publicly Held Corporation ™, I can assure you that the CFO and Investor Relations are highly attuned to changes in stock price, as frequently as three times a day (open, midday and close).
I suppose that if all that buying occurred in one day it works okay, but that requires market availability of a lot of shares…otherwise alarms should have already been going off at the parent company as share purchases spiked.
Actually, even as I type that…a share purchases graph would have made it a lot more obvious than price changes. I’m guessing the Bloomberg machine has that.
And having alerted the Lansings, Sloan can now look forward to being hassled by the HR guy.
Ungrateful corporate bigwigs… well, I can’t call it implausible.
The twins will get 45% of the company when they turn 25 and what Sloan saw happening was Savanah Cap buying up 6% of the company. When the twins sell their shares to Savanah, Savanah will have a controlling share of the company.
How she put that together, I have no idea. Sloan has no reason to know that the twins are going to sell their shares to Savanah just because they bought on 6% on some bad news. Hell, it’s good investing to buy on bad news if you think the company is going to bounce back. If you want a 6% of a company you don’t buy it the day it goes from $30 to $32, you buy it when it goes from $30 to $29. On top of that, buying that much would probably bounce the needle back up when not buying any would have let it fall even further than $29 on that days news (hence what Sloan saw).
She didn’t put it together until her former student at Savannah made the pun about “relative”. But going to your other point, it’s not clear the stock ever dropped on the bad news…it sounded like it went up immediately. And while we don’t know the market cap of ACN’s parent company, it’s pretty clear that 6% of the stock is probably something in the hundreds of millions of dollars…it’s ridiculous that it took Sloan and her computer to pick that up.
Didn’t they say that when the twins inherit, they’ll be worth something like 2.3 billion? So the overall market cap of the parent company is about five billion.
Yes, I do remember something about Sloan knowing about a merger and trying to figure out what it was, I don’t recall the details or how it played into this though.
The stock didn’t drop. ACN had a bad quarter, Sloan said it was going to drop a few points and then it didn’t. When it didn’t that’s when she started poking around and saw Savanah buying up (what she thought was) 5% and she figured out that they were about to be taken over.
I’m not sure how she figured out that the twins and Savanah were in cahoots though. I may (and probably did) miss something, I thought she just asked Reese something like ‘when do the twins turn 25’ and then she magically had it all figured out. But IMO, again, unless I missed something, just because one person has 45% and another has 6% doesn’t mean they’re going to put it together.
Good catch, I missed that. So Savannah had to splash about $300 million on the market to pick up that 6% of the stock.
As I mentioned above, it was the call to her former student that tipped her off.
Did you notice that bit at the end of tonight’s episode?
As Will was collecting his things from his cell, the camera tightly focused on the photo of Will and his father. I noticed that the father strongly resembled Will’s cellmate. And then I noticed that the blankets in the other bunk were still wrapped up. Also, Will had mentioned that he was supposed to be in solitary confinement. So the guy he was talking to was the ghost or hallucination of his father.
Next week is the series finale.
It’s amazing how this show, filmed six or eight months ago and written before then, is lining up with real world events going on right now. The college rape case (UVA) and the tension about the network moving to new media while over half of the senior staff at the New Republic resigned in the last week over the same issue, after being bought out by a new media (Facebook) billionaire.
Well, at least that abortion of an episode resulted in a great headline: Listen Here, Internet Girl: The Newsroom Rapesplains It All.