Wall Street Media Star
By Nancy Moffitt
A 'Kid From Queens,' Joe Battipaglia and Life as One of Wall Street's Best-Known Bulls
Joe Battipaglia was in the hot seat. It was October of 1997, at
the height of the Asian financial crisis, and Battipaglia was one
of three experts being interviewed on the Larry King Live show
about the U.S. stock market's related nosedive.
The trio discussed the market's recent gyrations at length.
But as the show came to a close, Larry King turned his attention
to Battipaglia, WG'78. "He said 'Joe, we only have a couple
of minutes. What's going to happen tomorrow?' "
Battipaglia recalled. "I said, 'Larry, I think the market goes
down 100 points or so in the first hour and then there's going
to be a rally.' " King then asked Michael Metz, an analyst from
Oppenheimer, the same question. Metz strongly disagreed
with Battipaglia, saying the recent volatility signaled the end
of the bull market. The third expert, the head of the banking
committee, declined to offer an opinion, claiming he did not
want to influence the markets.
Battipaglia didn't give the interview much thought on his
way home that night – television interviews, after all, have
become routine for the chairman of investment policy for
Gruntal & Co. But when he arrived home, his wife Maryann
was clearly nervous. "Now, she usually doesn't get nervous
about the markets and what I do," Battipaglia says. "So I
pressed her a little about what was wrong. She said, 'Well, the
president of Gruntal called.' " Battipaglia asked her if he had
seen the Larry King show. "Yes, he saw it," she said. "And he
said you better be right."
When Battipaglia arrived in New York the next day the
canyons of Wall Street were lined with reporters hungry for predictions
from Battipaglia and other Wall Street strategists. Battipaglia
did a few more interviews on the street, maintaining
his upbeat view.
And as if on cue, the market dipped then rallied that day.
"It worked out that the bullish case and buying on that dip was
the right answer," he says. "Those are the times, as a strategist,
that you really make a difference – when the call is ever so critical.
That's what people remember."
Battipaglia, 44, says he never worried, despite the call from
his boss, his somewhat shaken wife and swarms of reporters lining
Wall Street's sidewalks. "I sleep very well at night," he says.
"There's a fundamental belief that the U.S. economy is on a
significant growth trajectory and that investors will do the
rational thing and are smarter than Wall Street gives them
credit for. Bear markets tend to be short lived. Thus, you have
to look for the seeds of the next bear market, and if you don't
see them, you stay fully invested. If you're in the midst of a bear
market, more than likely you can ride it out in a positive way.
With that as a fundamental backdrop, I rarely get shaken."
Indeed, Battipaglia seems entirely unflappable. A day spent
trotting behind this giant of a man – he is 6'7" tall – revealed
an evenness uncharacteristic of someone who makes his living
trying to predict the habits of the most inscrutable of creatures:
the financial markets.
Wall Street Media Star
It's Tuesday, February 29, 2000 at 6 p.m. and the New York
Stock Exchange is stone quiet and empty other than the crew
from CNBC, the financial news network that camps at the
exchange each evening to review the day on Wall Street.
The largely young, artsy producers and technicians sprawl
on metal chairs, grazing on Oreos and trail mix and waiting for
the broadcast to begin. Battipaglia greets the talent – Ron Insana
and Sue Herera – both already coated in their waxy on-air
makeup, and talks about children, spouses and upcoming vacation
plans. He wanders restlessly around the exchange floor,
eventually finding his way to a tall director's chair where he too
is swathed in stage make-up by a black-clad make-up artist.
It's been a sizzling day on the NASDAQ, which topped
5,000 for the first time in early day trading, and Battipaglia
has fielded calls from reporters and producers all day. He wades
between the tangle of wires and cameras and sits next to Insana.
A production assistant clips a tiny microphone inside his jacket
and the countdown to airtime begins.
Six weeks later, during the second week of April, all three major
market measures suffered their worst point drops ever, wiping
out $950 billion in a single day, just shy of Brazil's $1 trillion
gross domestic product.
On Friday, April 14, the Nasdaq Composite Index, led by
Qualcomm Inc. and Intel Corp., fell 355.49 points. The 9.67
percent drop was the Nasdaq's second worst, just behind the
11 percent free fall on Oct. 19, 1987 and capping the worst
week in the much-watched index's 29-year history.
In a lineup of interviews from the Today show to CNBC,
Battipaglia was once again called upon to dissect the market free
fall, and to calm investors' rapidly rising fears.
"Our view is still the same," he said during in an interview
immediately following the market plunge. "What we have just
witnessed is a fast, deep, sharp correction of one third of the
value of the Nasdaq and 12 percent of the value of the S&P
500. But we are still in a bull market. We are looking for four
percent growth on the economy and 14.5 percent growth in
S&P earnings, a 30 percent growth in Nasdaq earnings, a situation
where inflation stays below 2.5 percent for the year, and
the Federal Reserve, which has already engineered five rate
increases, adds one more, and that will be it. We will roll into
the election in an environment where stocks will outperform
money funds for the balance of the year, and we are not changing
any of our targets or our asset allocations."
Battipaglia isn't exactly a household name, but his near-constant
presence in the media has made him a personality of sorts.
An April Business Week story that took a somewhat disparaging
view of Wall Street and the media's role in hyping the
stock market cited his number of television appearances - 238
within the past year - second only to influential Goldman
Sachs economist Abby Joseph Cohen's 259. Television, the
article said, is fueling a trend toward media-savvy "celebrity"
analysts and strategists who tend toward overly rosy views of
the market and have the power to move markets, sometimes
dramatically.
Battipaglia seemed undisturbed when asked about the article.
"The people who have the most media hits are the people
who work for full-service brokerage firms – people like myself
and Abby Joseph Cohen at Goldman Sachs. Our job is to pro-vide
advice and guidance to clients on a regular basis. It's not
inconsistent with a full-service environment to see analysts
with this kind of public profile," he says.
|
