SEC deposes Seaworld for statements to investors about blackfish

Not sure this is entirely newsworthy on it's own, but interesting nonetheless. With the little information available, you could infer that investors felt misled about the impact of the documentary.

http://www.tampabay.com/news/business/tourism/seaworld-shares-drop-...um=twitter

That was after my time there, but how do you attribute any change in business to a particular reason? I remember thinking earlier in that year, how do you justify price increases matching Disney and Universal without actually building anything new? Here comes more Harry Potter and New Fantasyland, and you have... ? Oh yeah, that's competitive!

Sure, it's hard to pinpoint one reason why attendance was down. But wouldn't it be just as hard to pinpoint one reason it's not down? And yet that's exactly what their leadership attempted to do. The position of the company during that time was "Let's have a pint and wait for this to blow over", which we know was misguided. I guess the question is whether that line of thinking broke some sort of reporting regulation for disclosing "material risk".

My personal opinion is that changing cultural views on animal captivity is a significant risk to future performance.