Symantec Mystery Probe Has Market Imagining the Worst

For the past few years, Symantec Corp. seemed to have been doing everything right. The world’s top maker of cybersecurity software started selling more to corporations -- chasing growth and balancing out its consumer-centric business. It made acquisitions and brought in a new chief executive. Its shares were rising.

So Wall Street was blindsided when the company disclosed that it’s conducting an internal investigation that will delay the filing of its annual report and could potentially lead to a restatement of earnings. The news was tucked into the fiscal first-quarter results late Thursday, and when analysts started asking questions, they were shut down. The company cut the post-earnings conference call short and canceled its scheduled call-backs later in the evening. That left it up to analysts to fill in the blanks. And they imagined the worst.