Tiger Woods pummels stocks

Get ready to be inundated by year-end and decade-end reports and retrospectives about Tiger Woods. His timing probably couldn't have been worse, news of his dalliances breaking about a month ago making them not too recent to cause them not to be fully understood, yet still fresh enough for everyone to immediately recall when reflecting on the past.

In this LiveScience story, they look at the impact on the share prices of his former sponsors:

A new study — not yet published in a journal — finds the market value lost to companies that had the golfer as a sponsor is already as high as $12 billion.

The estimate is separate from whatever money Woods himself may lose as a result of his missteps. The golfer was thought to make about $100 million a year in endorsement income.

"Total shareholder losses may exceed several decades' worth of Tiger Woods' personal endorsement income," said Victor Stango, a professor of economics at the University of California, Davis and co-author of the study.

Leading sponsors were (or still are) Accenture, American Express, AT&T, Electronic Arts, Gillette, Nike, Gatorade, TLC Laser Eye Centers, and Golf Digest with share prices for Electronic Arts (via their Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf game), Gatorade, and Nike reportedly faring the worst.