Maria's world

Amid swirling stock tickers and the din of the New York Stock Exchange, Maria Bartiromo is a fixture, poised to tell the CNBC-watching world what the sentiment on Wall Street is.

[Times photo: Lisa DeJong] In a sea of commotion, Maria Bartiromo reports from the New York Stock Exchange for the CNBC morning show, Squawk Box. She was the first person to report live from the floor of the stock exchange.

By KRIS HUNDLEY

© St. Petersburg Times, published December 3, 2000

It's Oct. 12, just seconds before the opening of the New York Stock Exchange. A Navy ship has been bombed in Yemen, there's more violence in the Middle East and Home Depot is reporting weaker earnings.

CNBC's Maria Bartiromo hustles onto the Exchange floor, adjusts her lapel mike and slings a broad smile at a television camera across the cavernous room, ready to sum up the sentiment from Wall Street. "It feels like one of the better days," she says as the opening bell rings.

In fact, Oct. 12 turned out to be one of the worst days on Wall Street. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 379 points, its fifth-biggest point loss. And the Nasdaq hit a new low for the year.

But 33-year-old Bartiromo, Wall Street's biggest cheerleader, has little time to worry about blowing a prediction. Clutching coat, papers, cell phone and a Chanel handbag, she dashes back and forth via hired Lincoln Town Car from Wall Street to CNBC headquarters in Fort Lee, N.J. She does 15 live shots between 8 and 10 a.m., a midday show at 2 p.m., the market wrap at 5 p.m. and, on Friday nights, her own show at 7:30.

The morning after the market's dive, she slips into a chair overlooking the premarket calm on the Exchange floor and preps for another round of prognostications. "Two major strategists are calling the market cheap," she says, reassuring her viewers. "They say the market is poised to recover."

This time she's right. By day's end, the Dow and the Nasdaq are up.

Making the climb

CNBC went on the air in 1989 amid skepticism that it could attract a following. Indeed, rival network tycoon Ted Turner at CNN called CNBC "a piece of garbage."

Since then, the nation's economy has had its longest-running expansion. The number of households with stock investments has doubled. Today more shares of stock trade hands in an hour than they did in a day a decade ago. And CNBC has become video wallpaper at brokerage firms and health clubs. While amateur investors find it addicting, the networkoften annoys professional investment counselors, who think it's more entertainment than solid advice.

CNBC now surpasses CNN in daytime viewership. Median household net worth of CNBC's viewers exceeds $1-million; more than half are CEOs, COOs, CFOs, owners or partners.

Some are even royalty. A little more than a year ago, when His Royal Highness Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Al Saud was sailing the Caribbean, the network received a fax from the prince, requesting permission to relay CNBC's signal to the royal yacht's private transponder.

"HRH relies heavily on CNBC to keep track of his portfolio," said the request from one of the world's richest men. Permission was granted.

Bartiromo, a Brooklyn, N.Y., native whose dad ran a restaurant and whose mom swore by certificates of deposit, graduated from New York University the same year CNBC was founded.

Straight out of college, she went to CNN, where she worked her way up from production assistant to writer to producer. After four years of behind-the-scenes work, Bartiromo thought she was ready to go on the air. Her boss, Lou Dobbs, then host of CNN's well-established Moneyline, disagreed.

Bartiromo had started chipping away at the Wall Street establishment during her CNN years, building contacts. "You start knowing the lingo and understanding what moves the markets," she said. "Little by little, you become a person people want to talk to."

She worked with a voice coach to tame her accent, sent an audition tape to CNBC and got the job. Two years later, Bartiromo became the first person to report live from the floor of the stock exchange. Traders, too busy to notice her earphone, lapel mike and the camera in the distance, at first thought she was talking to herself.

These days, heads swivel when she strides quickly through the NYSE's high-ceilinged main trading room, hustling to reach her post before the bell rings. Traders sidle up to say hello, blue-jacketed messengers jostle her, specialists shout bids all around her.

Clutching a sheaf of papers, with talking points highlighted in yellow, Bartiromo tunes out the distractions, focuses on the camera and is off. In a normal three-minute segment, she boomerangs from sector to sector, touching on analysts' downgrade of a bank stock, inventory buildup at a tech company, upgrades of consumer product stocks.

"I just got off the phone with the analyst," she says before breaking news of the latest downgrade. "I'm hearing a lot of buzz about the techs," she says before warning of a decline. "Abby Joseph Cohen is going to be on a conference call," Bartiromo says of Goldman Sachs' renowned market strategist. "And she told me what she's going to say."

When she left CNN, Bartiromo said co-workers were sorry to see her Rolodex go.

"I have different sources at each desk and I talk to the traders running the morning call," she said of the pre-market ritual at major brokerage firms. "My trick is to get that information out to the individual before it gets to the firm's biggest clients."

As the earnings, analysts' reports and rumors roll in, Bartiromo sifts through the noise and pulls out the nuggets for her next on-air spiel. "I edit things in my head," she said. "And I'm constantly working against the clock."

Something to squawk about

Bartiromo, who routinely fields marriage proposals as well as photo requests from viewers, may be one of CNBC's more attractive anchors. She was dubbed "Money Honey" by the New York Post and is compared with beauties such as Sophia Loren. But she's just part of the financial network's appeal.

During Squawk Box, billed as the network's "pregame" show from 7 to 10 a.m., anchor Mark Haines plays resident curmudgeon as he grouses about futures prices and needles guest analysts. Joe Kernen, an ex-stockbroker who has a master's degree in molecular biology from MIT, covers the winning and losing stocks of the day from a cubicle decorated with a lava lamp and Dilbert doll. David Faber, a.k.a. "The Brain," sits across from Kernen and skewers the same analysts whose recommendations are breathlessly reported from the NYSE's floor by Bartiromo.

It's an addictive mix of smart, edgy, up-to-the-second commentary on the ever-changing markets. And while stock charts and talk of P/Es abound, the Squawk Box gang isn't above having a good time.

When the show celebrated its fifth anniversary in late October, guests included longtime fans such as Johnny Bench, WWF's Bradshaw and Regis Philbin. When the Federal Reserve Board holds its quarterly meetings to ruminate about interest rates, the Squawk team speculates about their direction by sizing up the heft of Alan Greenspan's briefcase while the song Mr. Big Shot plays in the background.

And when Wall Street analysts suddenly abandon, en masse, a once-hot stock that's hit the skids, the morning graphic guys cue up a video of penguins leaping off an iceberg while Faber narrates. "There goes Credit Suisse," he says as one penguin after another heads for the icy water. "There goes Goldman. There's Paine Webber."

Poking fun at high finance while endlessly promoting it has proved to be a lucrative formula for CNBC. Though its daytime viewership of about 300,000 households is far below that drawn to a prime-time hit such as NBC's Frasier, which draws about 18-million households, it's enough to attract a lot of advertisers.

On a recent Squawk Box, the hour between 8 and 9 a.m. was sprinkled with 25 ads for everything from software companies to wireless services to local charity golf tournaments. Even the New York Stock Exchange's opening bell gets a sponsor on CNBC: On this day, it was Internet discount broker E-trade.

With its reputation as a must-buy for advertisers who want to reach affluent, influential decisionmakers, CNBC's revenues have been booming. This year, Los Angeles media consultant Paul Kagan and Assocs. expects CNBC to have net revenues of $521-million, up 33 percent.

The network has one handicap: Ad rates are based on Nielsen ratings, which, in turn, are based on in-home viewing. While CNBC insists that many of its regular viewers watch CNBC at work or while working out, that doesn't carry much weight with media buyers such as Stacey Lynn Koerner, a vice president with TN Media in New York.

"You have to consider that many times it's being watched in those places with the sound off," she says.

Among those regularly tuned to CNBC is Gerald Perritt, a Largo money manager and publisher of the Mutual Fund Newsletter. Perritt, who has appeared on CNBC several times, has a love-hate relationship with the network.

Perritt faithfully tunes in to CNBC at 7 a.m. every weekday and switches it off at 5 p.m. He likes the morning recap of the prior day's earnings reports, as well as the preview of market indices and the European market.

"These guys do a more than adequate job of conveying information about what an individual stock is doing at a specific time of day," he said.

But Perritt finds the on-air banter between Faber and Kernen childish, the repetitive news updates boring and the fact that some investors mindlessly react to minute-by-minute stock updates dangerous.

"People end up trading too much and they undo some pretty good financial plans," said Perritt, who disagrees with the premise that widespread dissemination of information gives individual investors an advantage.

"When information is instantaneously disseminated, prices react almost instantaneously," he said. "CNBC won't help you make money because by the time you know something, the market's already digested it."

Terrance Odean, an assistant professor at the University of California-Davis who studies investor psychology, has been interviewed on CNBC, but seldom watches it.

"It's for entertainment, isn't it?" he said. "Nothing against CNBC, but I think it's probably better to have more than a 10-minute investment horizon."

Odean said his father, an avid CNBC watcher, can spout off statistics about nearly every public company he sees. "It makes him more knowledgeable about something and that's not a bad thing," Odean said. "But it's for fun, not for profit."

CNBC disagrees.

"Profit from it," one network slogan boasts. In another recent ad, the CNBC stock ticker was superimposed on golf greens, airport runways and white picket fences and over affluent couples out for a night on the town as a singer croons about having the world on a string.

For all the promise of profits, Bartiromo insists that neither she nor the network condones day trading.

"I don't think individuals should be playing a traders' game," said Bartiromo, whose picture once graced the walls of a day-trading office in Tampa. "As an investor, you need to keep abreast of things, but you don't need to constantly watch every little tick in the market. I'm doing that. It's your prerogative what time frame you use for investing, but at the end of the day, I'm a complete proponent of long-term investing."

That's one reason Bartiromo said she launched her Friday evening program, Market Week, in the spring.

"It's not in the thick of things," Bartiromo says of the show, which is taped from a specially built set on the floor of the NYSE after the market's close. "My vision of it is people sitting back at home on their couch, saying, "Let me sit back, relax and digest this all.' "

But even in this after-hours format, Bartiromo is hardly relaxed. Twelve hours into her day in mid-October, she's got a new outfit, fresh makeup and a second wind. "Down but not out," she booms into the camera, referring to the previous day's market debacle. "Good evening."

In the next 30 minutes, she grills one global equity trader about sectors to avoid, runs a taped interview with the chief executive of Calpine Corp., quizzes a couple of Wall Street strategists about their "game plan" for the next week, and urges viewers to log on to CNBC.com's "Dow Challenge" to predict the index's closing price on the following Friday.

"Coming up next, Plays of the Week," she says, before racing through the stock picks of leading analysts.

Odean, who studies investor psychology, and Perritt, the money manager, predict that Bartiromo's endless enthusiasm, as well as CNBC's ratings, would be dampened by a market decline or, even worse, stagnation.

Said Perritt: "I lived through the bear markets of the early 1970s, when for almost two years stock prices did nothing but go lower. It's kind of a grinding experience to watch and see nothing good happening to your investments."

Bartiromo, who was a preschooler during those "grinding" years, dismisses such warnings. In Internet time, she says, a correction that might have taken two years in the past could be over in two weeks.

Besides, she's too busy to worry about phantom threats. Her days are nearly consumed by CNBC. Her social life, which used to revolve around all-important schmoozing with Wall Street types, has been curtailed while she polishes off a book that's being dictated to an assistant. With a June publication date looming, even kick-boxing with a trainer is out, replaced by the StairMaster at home in the mornings and a run on weekends.

"I've slowed down on my training," she said. "I need my energy for the book."

The book's topic is one close to Bartiromo's heart: the current information explosion.

While she's only too happy to promote herself, her show and her forthcoming book, Bartiromo is reluctant to talk about her private life. In June 2000 she married Jonathan Steinberg, publisher of Individual Investor magazine and son of high-profile financier Saul Steinberg. While Bartiromo's personal stock has been flying high recently, both Steinbergs have had their share of financial difficulty.

Father Saul sold his 34-room Park Avenue apartment and auctioned off its contents in the spring. The troubled insurance company he controls, Reliance Group Holdings Inc., is deep in debt and trying to restructure. And in September his 83-year-old mother sued him over an unpaid $5-million loan.

Son Jonathan recently sold two media properties to raise cash for his struggling financial publishing empire and said he is considering additional asset sales despite a belief that the market is "fundamentally misvaluing the company's assets." Shares of Steinberg's Individual Investor Group Inc. were trading Friday at about 70 cents, down from a high of more than $7 in the spring.

The closest Bartiromo comes to discussing her family life is to say that neither she nor her husband is an active stock trader, despite their immersion in the market.

"I'm a huge owner of GE, our parent company, and I have a couple of mutual funds that I bought years ago, but I never touch them and I don't buy individual stocks," she said. "My husband doesn't trade stocks either. We both feel it's too close for comfort."

While there's been speculation that Bartiromo will bolt CNBC for the big-time networks -- she tried out for a co-hosting gig with Regis -- she says she'll be with CNBC "at least for a couple more years" since signing a new contract for an undisclosed amount in July.

"I love business news," she said. "And my husband said I could have a dynasty withMarket Week. I'm hoping that happens."

Maria's words

ON NETWORKING: "I used to do a lot of dinners and it was important for fostering relationships. I bumped into George Soros and Charlie Rose at an event last night."

ON RUMORS: "I never, ever go with a rumor unless I see that it's already impacted a stock."

ON DOT-COM ARROGANCE: "I had an assistant, who is no longer with me, who came on the job and immediately demanded a Palm Pilot, a cell phone, a PC and, oh yes, she couldn't work Tuesdays. An arrogance was created and new generations began taking things so much for granted. That was a major red flag."

ON THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF MARKET INFORMATION: "About five years ago, one major strategist told me that he knew it was the top of the market because the women at Dunkin' Donuts were telling him about stocks. But I disagree. Why is it that the Dunkin' Donuts person can't know just as much as him? Who said that person is so stupid?"

HER BIGGEST FEAR: "Not being happy. In life, you have to love what you do. And I'm a very happy person."

ON BEING THE "MONEY HONEY": "It's flattering. But everybody really just calls me Maria."

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