Job Descriptions: The Financial Pundit

By Minyanville Staff Nov 05, 2008 11:45 am
Snap judgments about the monkey with the darts.
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There’s financial punditry and there’s financial punditry. CNN’s (TWX) Ali Velshi falls into the first category, as did Lou Dobbs before he took to calling himself Mr. Independent and started railing against a myriad of perceived injustices. The folks who broadcast from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange - financial pundits all of them.

But financial punditry -- not the Maria Bartiromo variety, but the other kind -- well, that’s a whole other ball of wax. It involves offering advice to a nameless, faceless audience without knowing its risk profile or time horizon. And it’s a big leap of faith, especially when you consider the impossibility of outsmarting the market. 

Certainly, a gentle ribbing’s in order.

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2008-11-05 17:31:38
JIM M
By the shovel full
As a farm hand when I was young I shoveled a lot of fecal waste of cattle into a spreader then spread it out into the fields so the grass would be greener and grow faster. It's truly not much different then the jobs of pundits. However Pundits these days seem to pile it on to high and it chokes out the very things they are trying to green up. Some Pundits purposely pile it high to brown things down. A good Pundit can make Bankruptcy a money making deal if you can bury enough shareholders before they can get their green out.

Lots of Pundits loose their effectiveness over time by piling it on and on. After all green is green only up to a point then if it gets any darker it turns black. As a farm hand I noticed that the herd always goes for the green stuff as if by instinct.

CNBC brings in the pundits by the train load. I still listen to them only to apply my contrarian views to their punditalizations. But lately I have noticed that with the complexities of the market fraught with fraud and lies and outright crookedness that even pundits can end up being right while thinking they were purposely misleading the herd by feeding them green thinking it was red because they couldn't get a transparent fix on a true color for lack of overall transparency. In the old days we called it shoveling Buckwheat which was a polite way of not calling it what it really is. ----

Hope this helps those who didn't understand what Pundits do.


JPM

PS Some of the best Pundits use the biggest shovels.
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