The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Week

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On the Dolans Cablevision hides from Wall Street's glare

1. Terms of Endearment

The sober-minded fellows who run Cablevision (CVC) have had it up to here with demanding Wall Street types.

The Dolan family that controls the Long Island-based company announced plans this week to spin off Cablevision's sports holdings and take the cable operations private. The move will shield the company and its tender-hearted executives from the klieg lights wielded by impatient stockholders.

"We strongly believe that a long-term, entrepreneurial management perspective -- not constrained by the public markets' tendency to focus on short-term results -- will better enable the cable company to meet its competitive challenges," Chairman Charles Dolan and his son CEO James Dolan said in a Monday press release.

That's swell, guys. One problem: It's hard to recall when the Dolans have ever shown any regard for what investors think.

Impatient stockholders didn't keep Cablevision from showering hundreds of millions of dollars on a money-losing high-definition satellite TV operation called Voom, years after EchoStar (DISH) and DirecTV (DTV) had more or less cornered that market. Nor did they keep Charles Dolan from firing some impudent directors who finally moved to shut Voom down, or from replacing them with his buddies.

For that matter, the gnats on Wall Street didn't keep the Dolans from pursuing a high-pitched public relations campaign against a Manhattan football stadium that would have competed with Cablevision's Madison Square Garden -- a project with no apparent bearing on the company's core cable business.

And we don't recall the money-grubbing hordes keeping Cablevision from jumping into the sports business and losing millions by throwing fistfuls of dollars at over-the-hill talent at basketball's Knicks and hockey's Rangers.

No, the sky should be the limit once those downtrodden Dolans finally slip the surly bonds of Wall Street.

Dumb-o-Meter score: 88. Something may be constraining these guys, but it's not the public markets.

To view Colin Barr's humorous video take on the Dolans and their reasoning behind taking Cablevision private, click here.