For our RSS viewers only...

Ignore the RSS version of this post: ( I got about 4 hits from blackberries around the world, in the few minutes between publishing and checking the facts.)

Please accept my sincere apologies.

Here's what went out on the RSS:
XRX Xerox Corporation announces common stock dividend:

The board of directors of Xerox Corporation (NYSE: XRX), a developer, manufacturer, marketer, service provider and financer of document equipment, software, solutions and services, announced on 12 February a quarterly cash dividend of USD4.25 per share on the company's common stock."

Ya gotta love these people. NOTE: Still need more time to confirm that I read this correctly. But in the meantime, I'm just going to feel good about it.
So if the stock is selling at around 6.5 or 7. And if I read this correctly, we are firmly on the right track. Just keep those dividends coming, while we wait for Wall Street to stop being so silly and frightened.

Go team go!

Plus you have to love "a developer, manufacturer, marketer, service provider and financer of document equipment, software, solutions and services," so much better than "office equipment blablablabla.

I read "USD4.25" as $4.25 per share. Although it most definitely was much too good to be true, I did learn a little about how greed and frustration works in shaping what you do. It helps me answer the "How do so many smart, relatively honest people get involved in Madoff's Ponzi scheme.

While I was doing my regular scan of Xerox, Oce, Ricoh feeds, my eye noticed the headline. Then when I clicked on the link I focused on USD 4.25 and changed it to $4.25 in my head.
Somewhere in my brain I heard "This has to be bullshit" But I clicked the Publish Button, before not after I did a few minutes fact check.

As regular viewers of this blog know, lots of my 401K is sitting with our Board Of Directors. I've been blablabla'ing about how they should increase the dividend while waiting for the idiots in Wall Street to stop being "deers in headlights" and our PR and Investor Relations people get the signal of what we do through the noise of the "analysts."

It makes much clear to me, how the WSJ could have published that story about Kodak earlier in the week. It reminds me that on the web, "loose key strokes can sink companies." And it reafirms to me that importance of trusting Print, even some newspapers, more than quickly running around yelling either "Fire! Fire!" or the "Messiah has come!" on the internets.

I'm pretty sure that by the time you read this, the web page at TradingDesk.com will have been corrected (the one I cut and pasted from was posted on Feb 13, 9:24 am or I will learn that USD4.25 does not mean $4.25 per share/per quarter.

The byline does say Feb 13, 2009 (M2 EQUITYBITES via COMTEX) . That should have set off an alarm. It should have said Rueters or Bloomberg or Press release.

I have to take my own advice that everyone needs to slow down a bit, take a breath, and only then hit the publish post button.