Keith McCullough, a sometime analyst on CNBC, was found today to have panned the contributors on the network on his blog “Diary of A Hedge Fund Manager”. The CEO of Hedgeye, a market research firm, is now a contributor on the Network’s fast money and the news is not surprising to any who have followed McCullough for any length of time. McCullough is a born self promoter, his ver appearence on Fast Money proves that. He has in the past engaged in Twitter wars with CNBC reporter Steve Liesman who taunted him about not getting enough air time on the network. McCullough’s research firm Hedgeye based at Hedgeye.com.
In one such blog entry posted in February of 201o, McCullough likened the folk on CNBC to “fast monkeys” who were much too far behind the trend in Global financial movements. He particularly pounces on the network for their treatment of the sovereign debt crisis in Greece. A “fast monkey” he said lives in the “zoo of consensus”. Whether or not he sees himself as an inmate of the same Zoo is as of yet unknown.
The website’s front page is simple in design and offers three different options, Morning News Letter, Real Time Stock Alerts, and Weekly Hot ideas all for the price of $29.95 for a monthly subscription. The quality of the tips contained in the news letters is not easy to guess at the effectiveness of the strategies therein. There is a virtual portfolio of long calls and short calls made on the site since its inception which puts it at 82.16% accuracy in calling long and 79.37% for calling short though without a clear understanding of how those figures were garnered it is difficult to comment on them.
This is not the first time a CNBC contributor has been dogged by the media though the most recent turn for McCullough is arguably much less serious. Jim Cramer, the host of the network’s Mad Money has been embroiled in controversies that far outweigh what came to light today. Cramer was subpoenaed by the SEC in 2006 over allegations that information had wrongfully passed between short sellers and analysts, including some at thestreet.com, Cramer’s website. Today’s controversy is not a patch on the kind of trouble CNBC’s correspondents have been in in the past.
Keith McCullough’s twitter feed is here. According to his stream his song of the day is Hallelujah by John Cale.
