The mercurial rise and fall of Krispy Kreme used to be a common topic on this blog, so I took notice of an interesting observation about the company that the NY Times’ business columnist Floyd Norris recently made on his blog:

Krispy Kreme came out with some more sort-of numbers today, and the market liked it. Its stock rose 17 cents, to $9.98.
The doughnut company said sales were down, and that it continued to lose money in the quarter ended in October. But it said it couldnít get out a 10-Q report to the Securities and Exchange Commission, or calculate just how much it lost, because it was too busy working on older reports.
The company has not put out any reports for the current fiscal year, and is still missing one from the quarter than ended two years ago.
But the stock has done well. It is up 74 percent this year. Short-sellers still hate the company, with the last monthly report showing a short position of 19.3 million, more than 30 percent of the shares outstanding, but others think the glory days will return. Some of those shorts evidently cannot find shares to borrow, but hold on to their positions anyway. The company has been on the list of stocks with a large number of failures to deliver for 110 days.
When the New York Stock Exchange continues to list a company, and investors continue to embrace it despite long-delinquent filings, it is hard to see what incentive the company has to get the full numbers out. It promised the S.E.C. today that it ìintends to file the Exchange Act Reports at the earliest practicable date,î but did not speculate on when that might be.

In other words, the company is doing so poorly that it has almost crossed the line to doing well. ;^)