Down Plays.

"If you build it, they will come," was the mantra of the movie "Field of Dreams." But if you forecast it, it's not necessarily preordained -- especially if it is stock market performance.

"Even in the best of times, you have limited ability to keep your stock from falling, says David Mangefrida, national director of asset management tax services at Ernst & Young. "Even a one-day drop is utterly beyond anyone's control. Still, it's amazing how many businesspeople think you can just forecast a trend outward and have it happen. As a result, they have no contingency plans for a potential market downturn. They let their debt/equity ratios get our of whack. They don't pay attention to cash flow because things have been going along great guns and they've been buying everything with stock." The moral of the story? "Don't plan as if the past is the mandated future," he advises.

And what other counsel does the Washington, D.C.-based Mangefrida have for CFOs who want to shore up sagging stock prices should the market bubble burst?

* Make strategic use of your stock if your company is better valued than its competitors. "If you're in the neighborhood for acquisitions and you think there's a good chance the entity you want to buy is too expensive at current prices, rake advantage of the fact that you may hit a market downdraft," he says. This is especially true, he adds, "if you've got a buy-back going on, so you've been slowly increasing the value of your stock." And if your stock is over-performing relative to your competitors' -- which doesn't necessarily mean that it's going up, but that it's going down less than theirs -- "All of a sudden, that target is a whole lot cheaper-looking in relative terms," Mangefrida says. "It's akin to the old buy low/sell high strategy. Don't buy high. Use that downdraft to make a good strategic fit." Then, not only will your company's acquisitions be cheaper, he notes, "but the market will reward you, because your stock price, relatively speaking, will go up even more." And if your firm is better valued in the marketplace than its competitors, seek acquisitions, he suggests. "The downturn is exactly the time to do it. Unfortunately, though, what often happens in corporations when the bad times hit is that everybody hunkers down and doesn't move because they're scared of their shadows. But that's when the smart people do their acquisitions. Don't do what the Japanese did and buy at the height of the market. But when...

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