In the annals of my television viewing history–right up there with the last Seinfeld episode and the first South Park I ever saw (the one about Mr. Hankey)–Thursday, March 2, 2000, shall forever be etched. That was the day 3Com spun off its growing PalmPilot business in an initial public offering.
Why?
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While the financial world holds its breath for the outcome of the regularly scheduled meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee, Haines follows Allen Greenspan’s briefcase as he walks to the gathering. Should the “Brief Case Indicator” cam reveal a thin valise, the rate will go unchanged, he claims. If the case is thick, brace yourself for at least a 25-basis-point hike in the federal funds rate.
My faith was also based in part on the fact that they’d made me some money. For I was quick to learn–and cash in on–the “CNBC Effect.” It’s in nearly every day trader’s personal playbook.
CNBC is “a retail source of financial information,” he says. “It’s not at the wholesale level. If you’re using CNBC, you need to recognize you’re very late in the professional news curve.
CNBC is by no means alone in the game. Wall Street reporting has exploded along with the markets, and many claim there’s as much irrational exuberance. “True, there have always been losers as well as winners in the stock market,” write Marcia Vickers and Gary Weiss in a recent Business Week critique of their media colleagues’ newfound function as Wall Street’s hype machine. “But never before has Wall Street raised expectations quite so high–and never before have the media joined in quite so willingly as cheerleaders and stock-pushers.”
While O’Donnell treated the episode as unsurprising, the issue of CNBC contributing to market volatility, especially in the technology-laden Nasdaq, elicited from him a rather loud “So what? Thank God stocks go up and down. That gives us a chance to buy and sell. I don’t have a problem with volatility. We live in volatile times.”
