Regular risks/hazards that are present for every product don’t need to be disclosed, but if there is something about your product that presents a unique risk, y

Regular risks/hazards that are present for every product don’t need to be disclosed, but if there is something about your product that presents a unique risk, you need to disclose it to investors. Investors normally don’t worry about mundane risks being disclosed, so there will probably be statements like “if the overall plant-based food sector does not grow as fast as our projections then we may not hit our growth/profitability targets next quarter,” which is totally expected and usually disclosed. In your example, if Beyond knew that their plant-based meatballs were harder to chew/swallow than regular meat-based meatballs, and there were emails showing that executives knew and chose not to say anything about it to investors, then they could be sued if people choked and an ensuing scandal hurt the stock price. Similarly, the FB investors are hoping to show that FB executives knew something more about Cambridge Analytica and chose not to disclose it, or chose to downplay the risk. That’s fraud. The issue isn’t that something bad happened, investors have to take risks. The issue is whether FB knew, and misled investors by lying or intentionally misleading wording.