As many of you know by now, my team and I launched PeerDecision recently. The site intends to facilitate high school seniors’ college admissions process. We have included a lot of features that we think would have been useful when we applied to colleges ourselves.. but that was quite a while ago. For any HS students who chance upon this site, go check out PeerDecision and tell me what you think! I’d love to hear any feedback that you have (jack at peerdecision.com).

Now back to the main topic of this post. As I was researching for a blog post for PD, I came upon Princeton Review’s financial statements. Many would probably assume that they make money hands over fist from their books being pimped everywhere, and their classes costing a ridiculous amount of money. It turns out that in fact the opposite is happening! Princeton Review is in fact hemorrhaging money!

Above is a chart showing Princeton Review’s operating results per quarter since the beginning of 2002. The darker color bar is the result for the quarter, and the lighter color bar is the cumulative result since 1st quarter 2002. You’ll notice that in the first quarter of 2004, Princeton Review took a massive charge of 30 million dollars and can’t seem to get its act together ever since…. The reason for the 30 million dollar charge? This is from their official press release:

• An impairment charge of $8.2 million to write down the goodwill associated with the Company’s 2001 acquisition of Embark.com, Inc.; and
• A valuation allowance against the Company’s deferred tax asset in the full amount of the asset, which is $22.1 million.

So, essentially a REALLY bad acquisition at the height of the dot com, and delinquent taxes… Talk about a messed up organization! It’s my hope that peerdecision will never end up like that :)

It’s been over a month since I last wrote an entry, but I promise I’ll explain why in later entries. What brought me out of hiding is the (very much expected, but still depressing) news that the Canadian Dollar has reached parity with the US Dollar yesterday morning (Thursday 09/20/2007).

Many probably no longer remembers this, but this is actually not the first time that the Canadian dollar has parity with the US Dollar. In fact, in the early 1970’s, the Canadian dollar was actually worth more.

I was actually in Canada in the last weekend for a wedding, and was already feeling the effect of the rapidly sinking US currency. McDonald’s dollar menu actually costs 1.39 in Toronto! Though the wedding itself was a great deal of fun, but wow things are now expensive in Canada!