To: Captain Jack who wrote (71712 ) 11/12/1999 10:24:00 AM From: Elwood P. Dowd Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 97611
This is a response I rec'd on the CNBC thread after I thanked Kernan for his efforts this morning in interviewing Kumar. El To: Elwood P. Dowd (3988 ) From: Gary M. Reed Friday, Nov 12 1999 9:35AM ET Reply # of 3989 CNBC Shill-o-meter is going off the scale. Hypothetical situation..."XYZ," trading at 60x earnings, pre-announces a month ago. Now the stock trades where it was *before* the preannouncement. Earnings come in...they don't even beat the new (lowered) estimate...simply meet them...and 2 cents under the so-called "whisper" number. Given the above-mentioned scenario, you know the Squawk crew would be having a field day "piling on" and spreading the doom-and-gloom. BUT, when the stock is DELL, a CNBC-Lite viewer fave, heaven forbid anything bad gets said...cripes, by listening to Kernan, Haines and Faber this morning, you'd think DELL exceeded estimates by a long shot. Exhibit One of how CNBC producers are loathe to negatively spin any news regarding the me-too, CNBC-Lite viewer fave stocks. I betcha they get a ton of hate e-mail anytime they even hint at speaking poorly of the CNBC-Lite viewer fave stocks (AOL, DELL, CSCO, etc.). When a company trades at 60x earnings and simply "meets" estimates that have already been pared due to a pre-announcement, that is not good...regardless of how you spin it. Shame on CNBC-Lite for caving in to appease viewers. And, in fairness to CNBC, CNNfn was spreading the same hype this a.m. Still doesn't make it right, though. I will laugh the next time Kernan slams a stock for simply meeting downward-revised estimates.