Thursday, August 6, 2009

Bloomberg TV, TiVo and the SPX

I had an interesting sequence of events happen to me today. I’m not sure they mean anything, but I thought I’d pass them along for posterity and the remote possibility that it may be of service to someone else further on down the line.

While I am decidedly not a chat room person, in the heat of today’s trading boredom, I decided to drop in the Market Rewind chat room, which is hosted daily by Jeff Pietsch of Market Rewind.

I couldn’t have been in the chat room for more than a minute or two when someone blurted out that I was “just on Bloomberg.” I assumed he meant some sort of mention in an article on Bloomberg.com, but it turns out he was referring to Bloomberg TV. Now I know I had not been out of the house all morning and had not even been on the phone, so this made me fairly curious. When I was unable to pull up anything on the Bloomberg TV web site, it occurred to me that the previous night I might have flipped on Bloomberg Asia before going to sleep. While I don’t know all the nuances of TiVo, I do know that even if you turn of the television, the last half hour or so of programming for whatever station you were watching is stored in a buffer. Perhaps my wife had not turned on the TV and changed the channel today…

So, I dashed upstairs and sure enough, found that Brennan Lothery had mentioned VIX and More as well as the newsletter in a short segment about the possibility of a correction in stocks. Specifically, Lothery picked up on the theme of Monday’s post, SPX 15% Over 200 Day Moving Average for First Time in Ten Years and used a recent chart of the SPX and the 200 day simple moving average to highlight the widening gap between the two.

To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time any VIX and More analysis has been referenced on any of the major financial television stations.

Adam at Daily Options Report noted how the multiple attributions and very positive tone of the Bloomberg segment was in sharp contrast to the almost comically confrontational approach CNBC has taken to bloggers.

While I am pleased to receive the recognition, I find it surreal that I would never have happened upon this without the following very unlikely events falling into place:

  1. I decided to wander into a stock chat room for probably the second time in my life
  2. I just happened to have Bloomberg TV as the last station I watched out of the 900+ DirecTV channels
  3. my wife was occupied all morning and unable to change the TV station

Finally, I am left with the thought that it is indeed possible to trap serendipity in today’s electronic fishing net, particularly if you have TiVo and can make a good guess at which channel might snare what you are looking for.

13 comments:

  1. Congratulations!!

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  2. My commiserations Bill. I am sorry to hear that your name has been dragged into the pit of the MSM.

    Try and keep your standards regardless.

    PS Seriously - my time in politics resulted in me losing any feeling that I once had that those in the public eye or in the mass media should be treated with any deference what-so-ever. The only difference is the perception of their own importance.

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  3. bill ,

    that is awesome ! But dont they need your permission to do something like that ? I am suprised no one contacted you .

    dave appel

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  4. well unemployment is giving me a big kick in the tender parts. i wonder if this gets backed by volume.

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  5. Just so you know I saw the article refering to your post pop up on my Bloomberg Terminal yesterday on the TOP news screen as well. Was only there a few minutes but quite the accomplishment.

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  6. Congrats Bill, but I'm really not surprised at all. These networks are at least smart enough to know that lucidity in the maelstrom, as opposed to the infotainment they seemed to have programmed themselves to provide, is outrageously valuable...
    Really, the bloggers will show them the way.

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  7. That's great! Definitely an improvement for Bloomberg from using monkey reporter/analyst to qualified people's opinion.
    Good Job!

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  8. Thanks for all the kind words.

    Douglass, I completely agree with your sentiment. Somehow, I now have, "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss..." in my head.

    Dave, while it would have been nice to get a heads up in advance, anyone is free to borrow the ideas -- and even the graphics -- from the blog, as long as they provide appropriate attribution, which Bloomberg did. Of course, regurgitating entire posts and failing to provide proper sourcing information would be another matter entirely.

    Perhaps I should put up a terms of use statement to clarify things. Frankly, I never had any intention of having anything I needed to 'enforce.' The last thing I want to do is spend my time with legal matters...

    Cheers,

    -Bill

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  9. Congratulations Bill. Well deserved.

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  10. Glad to know I am your go-to-guy in the height of boredom. A Bloomberg Blogger's Blogger -- LOL. ;-) Good work Bill, Jeff

    (Spell Check...)

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