A couple of interesting items from around the web.
(1) The New York Law Journal (June 10) has a column on the potential impact of the recent GAMCO v. Vivendi decision. In GAMCO, the court found that the plaintiff was not entitled to a fraud-on-the-market presumption of reliance because its trading strategy did not rely on the market price of Vivendi’s stock as an accurate measure of its value. The column’s authors suggest that in light of this decision, “defendants going forward should delve deeply into a plaintiff-investor’s decision-making process in an attempt to sever the link with market price.”
(2) The D&O Diary has a guest post from two Stanford professors who have studied the outcomes of securities class actions. Their findings, for the period from 2000 to 2010, include: (a) during that period there was no statistically significant change in the overall dismissal rate, (b) half of all settlements occured before a final ruling on a motion to dismiss and half occured after the motion to dismiss had been denied and the case had moved to discovery, and (c) the insurer contribution to settlements was higher among cases filed in the second half of the past decade than in the first half.
The 10b-5 Daily 