Subscriber Comment of the Day
Here is a brilliant exercise from Sir Lawrence:
Lawrencenewman
13m ago
question to grok:
Doug kass in his blog is always railing against cnbc and how their guests make a lot of bad suggestions and it’s dangerous for viewers. But do viewers really listen to such advice don’t they use cnbc for breaking news and entertainment and recommendations as just a launching point for their own research and decisions? If a viewer listened to every suggestion they would own 90% of the entire market
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You’re thinking about it the right way. Doug Kass (TheStreet Pro “Daily Diary”) has spent years arguing that CNBC guests cherry-pick winners, skip timestamps, talk with too much certainty, and rarely own the losers. That critique is not imaginary. The format rewards confidence and a bullish default more than a full track record.
That does not mean the typical viewer is sitting there with a checklist, buying every name that gets mentioned.
What actually happens
Studies of Mad Money and other CNBC segments find a real but narrow effect:
• Mentions spike attention (SEC EDGAR lookups, StockTwits, Robinhood popularity).
• There is often a next-day pop (“Cramer bounce”), bigger in smaller, less liquid names.
• A lot of that move fades over the following weeks. Long-term, following the pile of TV buys has not been a reliable way to beat a simple index.
So some people do act — especially on the names that get a spotlight and a simple “buy” — but it is a minority slice of the audience, and it is usually short-horizon noise trading, not “I now own this for a decade.”
CNBC’s own audience mix is closer to what you described: breaking news, futures, Fed/earnings color, interviews, and background noise for people who already have a process. Daytime linear ratings are not huge. A lot of the “viewership” is professionals with the channel on in the office, plus retail who treat it like sports radio for markets. Entertainment and narrative are features, not bugs.
Your “90% of the market” point
If someone literally implemented every guest idea, they would not own 90% of the market in a clean index sense — they would own a chaotic, overlapping, constantly churning mess: Mag 7 plus mid-caps plus crypto-adjacent names plus “great setup into earnings” banks plus whatever was hot last Tuesday. Position sizes would be undefined, sell discipline would be missing, and the portfolio would look like a highlight reel of the last six months of talking points. That is not how serious capital is run, and most viewers are not doing that.
Kass is useful as a governor: “this guest was wrong last cycle and is back with the same tone.” Viewers who treat the show as a source of questions (“why is everyone suddenly talking about this?”) rather than a source of orders are using it closer to its actual product.
The dangerous subset is not “people who watch CNBC.” It is people who confuse a 90-second segment with completed due diligence, especially in names that are small enough for a TV mention to move the tape. For everyone else, your framing is the healthier one: news + entertainment + a launching pad, not a fiduciary.
Positions: None.
