The Cutting Room: Good Information in a Strange Place

NEW YORK -- When lived in New York, I didn't wear makeup. But here I am, back where I grew up, and I'm wearing foundation, powder, crap under my eyes, hair spray...

Man, TV is weird.

"TheStreet.com" show this week was a little weird too, I suppose, in that regulars Herb Greenberg, Adam "Hideous" Lashinsky and Jim Cramer were all AWOL. In their absence, I represented Herb's doom-and-gloom Nasdaq-bear-with-a-smile; Aaron "Taskmaster" Task chimed in from San Francisco, running the Earnest Adam's grift, and in the role of screaming trader we had the Capitalist Pig's Jonathan Hoenig.

Of course, my boss, the fine and generous Dave Kansas was there to hold court, along with the real Gary B. Smith (not that Sports Illustrated pretender), and fuchsia-bedecked hostess-with-the-mostess Brenda Buttner instigated it all. If that sounds like too much to handle ... well, that was my worry, too.

As we sat in the Fox TV Green Room (which, following the fine tradition of green rooms, isn't green) in the bowels of Rockefeller Center, I looked over our guest, the distinguished Thomas Madden, executive vice president and chief investment officer for Federated Investors. I tried to imagine Madden's unfortunate fate as I was fitted for the IFB receiver in my ear. He's a value guy. He's a steak eater. He was in from Pittsburgh, where people are surely saner and I believe the local heroes don't wear makeup and hear voices in their ears. I worried about what he was getting himself into.

But Madden proved he could give as well as take. During our free-for-all discussion of this week's Nasdaq fall, Madden jumped in forcefully as the bull. He said that his trader had bought $10 million dollars worth of tech stocks for $9.2 million (I may have the number wrong -- I wasn't taking notes -- but the sentiment was right there). I suggested that perhaps we were seeing an early appearance of the spring selloff that's characterized the Nasdaq in recent years. Kansas equivocated. Gary B. said something about a chart. Hoenig rambled while waving a copy of USA Today or a list of communist sympathizers or something.

Yet Madden held his own, sticking to the view that, in spite of market hiccups, as long as the tech companies are still growing their stocks will too. I happen to think that a guy throwing around $24.5 billion in assets has a more authoritative voice than me. He's been in this market and plenty of other markets from the time when I was ogling Farrah Fawcett posters.

True, we journalists spend our days and evenings talking to, hopefully, Wall Street's best: the money managers, the traders, the CEOs. I try to make it my goal to be as informed as guys like Madden, but c'mon.

At the end of the day (which comes damn fast in New York, by the way), I'm not the one with money on the table. I can follow the market. I can watch my mutual funds gyrate. But I don't own stocks. I'm not putting my mortgage on the line. I can talk about my reporting, but I haven't been around long enough to pontificate on the ways of the tape.

Then there were predictions and analysis, including a fine analysis of Chevron (CHV) and Halliburton (HAL) by Smith and Task (!). And Hoenig called a bottom in Philip Morris (MO), hollering something about giving away free cheese. Strangely, I found myself saying that Eastman Kodak (EK) would come to be seen as a secret high-tech company, with patents, scientists and a serious photonics play that's catching the interest of Corning (GLW), SDL (SDLI) and JDS Uniphase (JDSU).

But I would have been just as happy to sit and listen to Madden teach me about the markets, makeup or not.

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