How Decades Covering Wall Street Led Me to My Latest Exposé

I've devoted most of my career to outing companies with potential issues... I even created the imaginary "Hostile React-O-Meter" in my columns to gauge responses to anything I write that is remotely controversial. It has since become a contra-indicator of sorts. But constantly poking around the underbelly of the seamier side of Wall Street had […] Not rendering correctly? View this e-mail as a web page [here](. [Empire Financial Daily Weekend] How Decades Covering Wall Street Led Me to My Latest Exposé By Herb Greenberg --------------------------------------------------------------- [Here's what you missed on Thursday]( The recent sell-off has opened a "backdoor" that could crush gold and double your money on some surprising stocks. The man who's been called "the finest business journalist in America" by Jim Cramer explained how it works... And even gave away a FREE recommendation using the same strategy that could have doubled your money 14 different times so far. [Watch the replay by the end of today](. --------------------------------------------------------------- I've devoted most of my career to outing companies with potential issues... I even created the imaginary "Hostile React-O-Meter" in my columns to gauge responses to anything I write that is remotely controversial. It has since become a contra-indicator of sorts. But constantly poking around the underbelly of the seamier side of Wall Street had an unintended consequence... In the process of writing about what could go wrong, I also started paying attention to what could go right... and developed a great appreciation of what makes a genuinely good business. After nearly 50 years of researching and writing about companies, businesses, and industries, and interviewing hundreds if not thousands of executives, analysts, and fund managers, I know what to steer clear of in a company... and what I like. I got into this whole business, including journalism, through the backdoor... at a time when there was a backdoor. It's actually the last thing I wanted to do. I'm a native of Miami and I grew up in the square-mile town of West Miami. My father, who dropped out of college during the Great Depression, sold furniture and went on to be the assistant manager for a third-tier local department store chain. My mother, who got her master's degree from Columbia, worked as a social worker for a nonprofit. Her primary focus was adoptions and foster kids. Our family struggled financially, and other than the shares in Dow Chemical given to me by my mother's father, who was a dentist, the stock market was far from my world. Like so many kids of my era, my first job was delivering papers on my bike. In Miami, that meant the afternoon and early Sunday morning Miami News. As I got older and could drive, I ditched the newspapers and spent one summer cleaning toilets and doing other odd jobs at the warehouse of some family friends, who owned a small chain of clothing stores. Now, unlike my closest colleagues at Empire Financial Research – all of whom are from the Ivy League – I didn't go to Harvard... Like quite a few of my high school friends, I spent my first two years of college at Miami-Dade Community College. It was there that I stumbled into journalism on my way to thinking I would become a radio disc jockey. The only career path to radio offered by Miami-Dade was through journalism. I started writing for the college newspaper. Surprisingly... I liked it. My first job out of college was with the now-defunct Boca Raton News, where I was the paper's first business reporter. A year and a half after starting in Boca – bored and wanting to get out of Florida – I landed a job in Nashville at Amusement Business, which was an arm (and predecessor) of Billboard magazine. I covered circuses, carnivals, fairs – good prep for Wall Street, I like to say – as well as auditoriums and arenas. A few years earlier, the singer Jimmy Buffett had the same job. But with six state fairs under my belt – and once again ready for a change – I wanted back into daily journalism... --------------------------------------------------------------- Recommended Link: [Hedge fund legend calls 'The End of Real Estate']( Few people see what's coming. But Whitney Tilson is predicting the end of real estate. And it's already starting. [Tilson reveals everything right here](. --------------------------------------------------------------- My next job was as a business reporter at St. Paul Pioneer Press... The Twin Cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis were like a mini-Chicago for business reporting, with dozens of well-known public companies. I covered the railroads (Burlington Northern), airlines (Northwest and the old North Central), retailers (Dayton Hudson, now Target (TGT), and a few others that no longer exist). I also was the beat reporter covering 3M (MMM), where I met my wife, who was a writer in the PR department. While at Pioneer Press, I also freelanced a few stories for the New York Times. I was later recruited away to Chicago by Crain's Chicago Business, which I regard as the boot camp of my career, where our goal was to cover the annual meetings of any and every company on our beats, even if only a handful of people attended. My beats included the steel companies, industrial manufacturers in the suburbs, and a few conglomerates that no longer exist. I learned the steel industry from the inside out and was at the dedication of – and had lunch inside – Inland Steel's Blast Furnace No. 7 in Indian Harbor, Indiana, the last major blast furnace built in the U.S. A few years later, wanting to kick it up a notch, I shifted to the Chicago Tribune... Here, my beats included food manufacturers – Quaker Oats, Kraft, the old Beatrice Foods – and restaurant chains like McDonald's (MCD)... breaking a few big merger stories in the rapidly consolidating food industry along the way. Within a few years I became the Chicago Tribune's New York Financial Correspondent, where I covered Wall Street. Two years later, yet again eager for something entirely different, I tried my hand as an analyst at a merger arbitrage firm. I figured the worst that could happen was that I could go back to reporting. About a year into the job, a friend from the San Francisco Chronicle called, saying they were starting a new business column and wondering if I would be interested in applying... A column... San Francisco... And this was 1987. It was appealing, but the arbitrage job was considerably more lucrative. But then... a few months later, the stock market crashed. I immediately thought of all the people who were about to lose their jobs, including some with better skills than I had. That night I went home, called my pal in San Francisco, and asked if the job was still open. A few months later, I started writing six columns a week... and did that for 10 years. For the final five years, I was also the morning business reporter at the local NBC affiliate, which was owned by the family that owned the Chronicle. I also spent part of that time writing a monthly column for Fortune magazine and doing weekend "mailbag" segments on the CBS radio affiliate. It was in San Francisco where I also started talking with short sellers and gaining a reputation for digging into companies... That was just as Silicon Valley was booming, initial public offerings ("IPOs") were blooming, and the bull market of the 1990s was taking off. One of my first calls after I got the job was to the best-known short-selling firm at the time, which was in Palo Alto. And it wasn't just short sellers I was calling... I started meeting with investment bankers, lawyers, private equity partners, analysts, public relations people, CEOs – either for breakfast at 7 a.m. at the Mandarin Oriental or Campton Place Hotel, or lunch (my booth) at the old Kuletos on Union Square. My goal was to create a proprietary column, and that meant going against the grain. Instead of just writing about stocks that could go up, I needed to poke holes in companies whose stocks could fall. But to do that, I needed to know everybody. I started at the Chronicle pre-Internet and walked away from the column post-Internet. The decision to leave a high-profile job I loved came after CNBC's Jim Cramer gave me an offer that I couldn't refuse to join his fledgling and very edgy TheStreet.com... Jim had been a fan of my work early on. Like quite a few New Yorkers in the pre-Internet world, he would have my column faxed to him every morning by one of his San Francisco brokers. A column like mine could have stock-moving news... but only if you saw it. As the Internet evolved, I knew I wanted to be part of it, and before he actually offered me the job, Jim and I had been talking about his plans for TheStreet. In the early days of the Internet, with the Chronicle's blessing, I had created a site on America Online ("AOL") for my Chronicle column. It also featured investment message boards and another trader who wrote a column. I even hired a few producers. I always like to think that Jim, who had greater resources than I did, got the idea of TheStreet from what I was feebly trying to do. When I finally flew out to see him, he literally took out his checkbook, opened it, and asked, "How much do you want?" At the time, I was also considering a joint deal with the Wall Street Journal and CNBC, but Jim won. As he recalled in his book, Confessions of a Street Addict... At TheStreet.com, we were pleased to rope in Herb Greenberg, the finest investigative business journalist in the country, from the San Francisco Chronicle, a hire that further boosted our traffic immediately. I became the first fairly well-known mainstream reporter at the time to shift online... back when "online journalism" was considered experimental with a high likelihood of failing. At TheStreet, and later at MarketWatch, I continued pounding away at companies, and the Hostile React-O-Meter kept spinning out of control. If you watched me and Jim together on CNBC, you'll probably recall that things sometimes got heated... Through it all, I've been a contributor to CNBC – spending three years as a full-time on-air commentator – and I co-founded two short-biased research firms. The research firms, both started with friends, tapped into my entrepreneurial drive. They also let me do something I had always wanted to do... and that's working with my sources. Last but not least, in the months before joining Empire, I had a very brief stint at activist short selling. Just as I was getting started, Enrique called with an intriguing opportunity at Empire... and here I am. And this is all before I turn 70. I'm exhausted just thinking about it. But, boy, did I have fun, and I learned more from experience than any book could teach... And now, I've put that experience to work with a brand-new exposé... The huge volume of buying and selling we've seen this year has opened a "backdoor" the likes of which we haven't witnessed in two decades. This backdoor could transfer money from Wall Street's elite into your account... on some very particular stocks of high-quality businesses... for the chance to double your money. I wanted to share this massive investment story with folks like you... So on Thursday, I hosted a special event to explain the whole thing. But if you missed it, you're in luck... For a limited time, we've made a replay available of the entire event. [Watch it right here](. Regards, Herb Greenberg March 26, 2022 If someone forwarded you this e-mail and you would like to be added to my e-mail list to receive e-mails like this every weekday, simply [sign up here](. © 2022 Empire Financial Research. All rights reserved. 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