No. And I'd get used to it. They listen to makers of washer and dryers.And credit card companies. 

The last 20 or so years all depended on the ratings of viewers, and comments on how to make the programming better. Proof in that statement lies in the 1996-2000 programming that turned ratings from a dismal 2'ish area to a low 7's in some cases. That was due to fans watching every week, and their mail boxes overflowing with comments on their shows. 

Nowadays, those mail boxes are filled with stockholders notifications and how many shares were sold that day. 

A good example can be found on any website that has shareholding information. Nasdaq, Lycos Finance, ect...the two biggest holders of the stock are General Electric and Citigroup Incorporated. 

Fine makers of GE Microwaves and CitiBank Visa's. 

But why General Electric? They own CBS. And Viacom. MTV. TNN. They are basically a "good faith" holder, showing no more reason than they run all the programming run by the WWE. They own a large sum of 2.3 million shares, or almost 29 million. 

The other major holder of the stock is CitiGroup, owners of banks, Diner's Club, CitiBank cards, and a ton of offshore banking groups. They are into WWE for a total of 1.155 million shares, or 14.5 million. 

Now this is where it get's boring, so unless you can follow stock analysis and all that crap, skip between the line breaks. 

Top Institutional Holders   Shares   %Out*   Value**  Reported

Citigroup Inc.    1,155,243 7.27  0  $15,122,130 31-Mar-02

Artisan Partners Ltd Partnership  707,400  4.45   $9,259,866  31-Mar-02

Gamco Investors Inc   693,500  4.37   $9,077,915  31-Mar-02

Barclays Bank Plc   374,308  2.36   $4,899,691 31-Mar-02

Wynnefield Capital Mgmt LLC  330,000  2.08   $4,319,700  31-Mar-02

General Electric Company  2,307,692  14.53   $30,207,688  31-Mar-02

Massachusetts Financial  1,843,750  11.61   $24,134,687 31-Mar-02

Capital Guardian Trust Company 1,825,650  11.49   $23,897,758  31-Mar-02

Legg Mason Inc.   310,360  1.95   $4,062,612  31-Mar-02

Vanguard Group, Inc. (The)  194,778  1.23   $2,549,644  31-Mar-02 

What does that all mean? That is your top ten investors for Vince and Co., who have a total of 127 million racked up in his company. To give you an idea of what could make this a little more clear, let's look at it from this perspective. Today, July 9th, 2002, the amount of stock purchased was 83 thousand shares. The amount of stock sold today was 154 thousand shares. Nearly double. 

And what you see on television, with the panic booking and strange storylines? It has almost nothing to do with you. The reason they're still in business. 

It's all about their financial standing. You could buy every t shirt in the world. Every CD. All the merchandise they sell, and you wouldn't make a bit of difference in their strategic booking. 

Right this moment, the stock is a strong recommendation to buy (most likely due to Austin being gone and Kevin Nash hurting himself. No? Well, one can hope). But a majority of that reasoning is due to the strong hit the market took on the WWE stock. Their biggest lull was selling at a measly 11.37, and now worth 12.50. On their high end, the stock was quoted at 14.65 a share. Vince has a long way to go, since he's near rock bottom since he went public with his company. 

What does this all mean?  

Simply put, your opinion doesn't matter as much anymore. 

Vince has sold off about 30 percent of his stock to outside investors, and the top ten investors have lost over 35 million to him alone. They only own about ten percent of the company, which means that overall, WWE has lost about 350 million dollars. 

That puts Vince at about one billion dollars when he went public. Now he's only worth about 650 million. And he's also in a position where stockholders can ask him to step down from his CEO position, and ask to appoint a new Chief Executive Officer. 

Vince wouldn't run the WWE anymore. 

Now he (Linda, actually) does own well over 51 percent of the company, and could easily refuse. But then what? 

Everyone sells, as well as his frantic booking which would drop sales...and Vince would be so broke that he'd be doing Raw out of high school and college gyms again. 

Notice the hiring of new names as well as huge? 

Just to boost that stock. 

Storylines aren't as dramatic as they used to be? 

I'm sure CitiGroup wouldn't approve of some of the over the top stories. 

Stone Cold is only suspended, and not fired? 

I hope some of this might make some more sense from the financial side... 

Adam