“I was walking around with her, and all the big shots were coming up and introducing themselves. They were gaga over her,” a “financial industry source” tells Bedard.

The New TV Money Honey [US News]

While we're on the topic, we might as well mention that Ben Stein also seems to have an inflated view of the role of economists at investment banks, and perhaps in the world. Most traders and brokers we know tend to regard their economists as irrelevant at best and hazardous at worst. They are used to economists taking positions that are unhelpful to their book or to their sales efforts. But they don’t mind that much because they don’t think many people listen to—much less follow the advice of—their economists.

“These guys are talking heads for us. Part of brand promotion on a grand scale. They might as well work for the PR department. They get the firm’s name out there but, internally, no one really trades on what they say,” one equity trader with over twelve years experience tell us.

There are very few rewards for being a financial journalist. You don’t get rich, unless you are a pretty girl and use your access to wisely marry well (or, at least, wealthy). It doesn’t impress girls much. And your relatives quickly lose their enthusiasm about your job when they realize you can’t pick stocks for them. Even worse, you might get invited to the Financial Follies.

Just as the city hall press crew gets to have it’s Inner Circle follies and the Washington press corps throws the famous Gridiron dinner, New York's financial media has an annual rubber chicken dinner of its own. Each year, on the Friday before Thanksgiving, the Financial Writer’s Association throws something called “the Follies.”

[More on this after the jump]

If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich? It’s a perennial challenge that the people who write about finance for a living get from those who are actually doing finance. Another version of it is a twist on an old saw: those who can do finance do, those who can’t, report on it.

Both challenges are more or less fair. Journalists reporting on Wall Street rarely have the skill set and mentality that leads to grand success at trading or investment banking. Many are talented writers and insightful critics. But often great journalism is built upon an attitude of skepticism that can be out of place in the world of dealmakers and traders who prize “conviction.”

But many journalists have at least felt the temptation to step over the line from Wall Street watcher to Wall Street warrior. And on occasion someone does. The latest victim to this perennial temptation is Ron Insana, the sixteen-year veteran of CNBC who is starting Insana Capital Partners Legends Fund.

This morning on Deal Journal Dennis Berman reveals that Insana’s Legends Fund will be structured as a fund-of-funds, and will access the management talents of at least 13 top money managers. SAC Capital Advisors, Renaissance Technologies Corp., Perry Corp. Third Point, Omega Advisors and Icahn Management are among the funds that Legends plans to invest in.

Although it applies to all fund-of-funds, it seems fair enough to ask what added value Insana is bringing to investors if his “strategy” is going to be investing in some of the most well-known hedge funds in the world. The Legends Fund plans to collect a 1.5% annual fee plus another 2.5% placement fee for the initial investment, and will require 24 month lockup. So what do investors get for those fees and the risk and opportunity cost of the lock-up?

Well, according to fund documents Berman looked at, investors will be able to take advantage of a “macroeconomic outlook as guided by Ron Insana.” Without disparaging the acuity of Insan’s outlook, that’s probably not worth the price admission. It seems what’s really being marketed to investors is the opportunity to get in on the returns of some of the biggest names in the hedge fund world with a relatively small investment. Many of the most prominent funds are closed to new investments or require enormous initial investments. You can buy into Insana’s fund for as little as $500,000, and have access to a diversified group of hedge fund returns. You probably couldn’t get Stevie Cohen, the founder of SAC Capital, to even answer your calls with a $500,000 check.

“As any good reporter knows, access can be money in the bank. And here the document is up front about what Insana is offering, saying it capitalizes, in addition to financial analysis, ‘on the long-standing relationships of the Firm’s founder Ron Insana,’ Berman writes.

Berman points out that not everybody is as confident as, well, Insana is about the fund's prospects. "The 16-year CNBC veteran raised some media eyebrows when it was revealed last fall that he was launching the fund. One Dow Jones columnist said the move signaled that “it’s probably time for everyone else to get out” of the hedge-fund business," Berman writes.

That columnist was MarketWatch's David Weidner, who said that Insana's entry into the fund management business was a sign that "the glory days of hedge funds are over."

Insana apparently isn't replying to requests for comments on the Legends Fund. But somewhere we suspect he's reading these journalists carping about his new venture and thinking, "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?"

Access Wall Street: Starring Ron Insana’s Hedge Fund [Deal Journal]

Should the New York Stock Exchange put Paul Krugman on retainer? That’s the conclusion of Paul Greenberg writing in today’s Washington Times.

Surely another dip in the market is bound to come -- so long as there's a business cycle -- but Paul Krugman's magic touch keeps delaying it, turning every down into still another unstoppable up. It's positively unnatural. The man is a kind of walking, talking, and, best of all, writing version of Al Capp's poor little jinx of a character, Joe Btfsplk -- only in reverse, leaving not disaster but good fortune wherever he goes. The New York Stock Exchange ought to put him on retainer. If only Paul Krugman would just keep writing about the coming End of It All, prosperity might be assured.

But it isn’t just Krugman as a contrary indicator of the direction of the financial markets that has caught Greenberg’s attention.

Then there's the language in which Mr. Krugman sends out his jeremiads. It is, in a word, hilarious -- if unintentionally so. He has to be the country's leading practitioner of purple-as-a-bad-bruise prose. Mrs. Malaprop might have spoken like that if only she'd had a Ph.D. in the dismal science.

I've saved my favorite Krugmanism of all time for those occasions when I may need a bit of cheering up: "And when the chickens that didn't hatch come home to roost, we will rue the days when, misled by sloppy accounting and rosy scenarios, we gave away the national nest egg."

As prose, that's a lot of poultry. Try to visualize those chickens that didn't hatch coming home to roost, if you can stop laughing. Why, that's almost Zen, like the sound of one hand clapping. His reference to the national nest egg is just lagniappe.

One note to Greenberg: if you are going to criticize the writings of others, avoid the word “lagniappe.” We have no idea what that word means and no intention of looking it up. In fact, we couldn’t read any further after we saw that word because it made us feel nauseated. It sounds like something we drank at Mardi Gras once and we’re afraid to find out what they put in it.

Sound of one man weeping [Washington Times]

At the beginning of the month a dispute broke out between CNBC’s Charlie Gasparino and DealBook’s Andrew Ross Sorkin. Gasparino had reported that Apollo was considering going public, following the footsteps of the Blackstone Group and the map laid out by Fortress Investment Group into the public markets. Sorkin declared that CNBC had simply got the story wrong. “It’s not true. Apollo is not going public next month, nor the month after that — and probably not the month after that either,” Sorkin wrote.

As the story progressed it seemed that Sorkin was at least half-right. Reports were published indicating that Apollo was not yet getting ready for a public offering of shares. It was said to be considering a private offering of equity instead. Since these privately sold shares would probably come complete with registration rights that would allow them to be sold on the public markets eventually, the CNBC story didn’t look quite as far off as Sorkin’s item made it seem.

But the reports coming out from the Milken Institute's annual Global Conference indicate that Sorkin may have overshot in his takedown of Gasparino’s report. Apollo founder Leon Black stopped short of commenting on his firm’s plans for an equity offering, but it seems clear they are at least considering a public offering.

Here’s how Business Week describes Black’s remarks at the conference:

But Black did build his case for public ownership of the businesses. He said publicly traded shares would allow him to retain top managers and recruit new ones by offering them stock in the firm. He also said such an offering would give him currency to acquire other, smaller firms. One of the ways Black said he's been able to achieve superior returns was by hiring investment managers with experience in specific industries. He said he'd like to expand that expertise, noting that health care and energy were two areas in which his firm was weak.

Does that sound like someone who isn’t considering a public offering?

The Predator's New Ball [Business Week]

As a way of saying thank you for the Pulitzer, the Journal has opened up its backdating archives. You can read all about the scandal, starting from the very first story published thirteen months ago. (Has it only been 13-months? It seems like we’ve been writing about backdating forever. Oh, right. That’s because DealBreaker started just eleven days later.)

This video--which we found thanks to Barry Ritholtz--is actually a good introduction to backdating, and good background on how the Journal discovered the story and pursued it. In many ways, it is superb journalism, and congratulations are due to the reporters who performed it. Rather than purely old-school investigative journalism—the kind that relies on leaks, anonymous sources and (possibly) manipulation by government agents—the Journal’s backdating coverage was a new style of investigative journalism. They took the work of academics and applied it to the real world of business and individual corporations and corporate leaders. As academics increasingly note the costs of Sarbanes-Oxley and the dangers of criminalizing agency-costs, there might be hope that this kind of investigating the arguments of academic reporting may help enlighten the public rather than add more confusion and ignorance.

And there is little doubt that a lot of the reporting on backdating was poorly reasoned and misleading. The worst of it came not from the Journal but from reporters and editorialists who tried to make up for what they lacked in original findings by adding more outrage and inferring even more criminality. There still are many out there who believe that backdating somehow proves that corporate is under-criminalized.

“Much reporting has made it sound like backdating was the equivalent of executives taking erasers and white-out to their paychecks to add a couple of zeroes -- and public understanding still suffers from this bum steer. But all that backdating comes down to is a nonmaterial accounting irregularity (yes, readers, accounting rules should be obeyed!) involving a defective judgment about whether ‘in the money’ options needed to undergo expensing,” Holman Jenkins wrote in an article that all but indicted his own paper’s coverage.

Why did the backdating story get reported like this? The outcome was probably over-determined. Scandal sells papers whereas reports about nonmaterial accounting defects do not. It also wins prizes. But something more than that was in play, as well. And that something is a political agenda. It is clear from the video is that the Journal reporters see the backdating story as just a smaller part of the struggle for truth, justice and reducing executive compensation.

But don’t take our word for it. Listen to leading Wall Street Journal backdating reporter Charles Forelle.

“Besides the individual who may face jail sentences or SEC sanctions, there’s the broader issue of executive compensation being thrown into the limelight again,” Forelle says around the five minute mark in the video. “Companies are starting to show at least a glimmer of thinking more carefully and more intelligently about how they give options to CEOs since options are by far the instrument that’s caused the majority of the rise in CEO pay over the last couple decades.”

A Pulitzer for A Perfect Payday [Wall Street Journal]

The earliest reviews of Conde-Nast’s Portfolio are coming in. We probably should be doing things like reading the actual magazine. And we’re planning on getting to that as soon as we get up the courage to lift its 300-plus pages from the place where we dropped it. (Bess Levin’s desk, with a note: “Summarize all relevant data—Thks-JC.”)

But fortunately lots of other people are reading Portfolio so we don’t have to. Here’s a quick round-up of the early reactions.

Portfolio arrives to a somewhat testy Going Private, who thinks the magazine gets it wrong even before the first page. Even the cover is wrong, the acid penned mistress of the private equity world says. What’s wrong with the cover? According to Going Private it depicts “a bunch of hideous downtown rooftops bathed in the caustic acid of sodium lights on a business magazine cover that doesn't even have a feature article on the financial performance of local roofing contractors or sodium light distributors.”

DealBook comes in with two items today on Portfolio. The first notes that the magazine wants to bring some glamour to world of business magazines.” And by glamour you get feeling that what they really mean is “women.” Indeed, as we noted a long, long time ago, Portfolio is aiming at being something of a business magazine for women. Most business magazines have readerships heavily tilted toward the male. Portfolio predicts that it will have a much more balanced readership. And apparently it hopes to achieve this by re-imagining corporate board rooms as a sort of red carpet or awards show where “business executives treated like celebrities,” according to DealBook.

After the jump we give Portfolio's readers the full treatment.

Women's Wear Daily reports that Conde Nast's new business magazine has hired bloggers.

...portfolio.com has added three bloggers to the fold: Lauren Goldstein Crowe, who helped launch Time Style & Design, will blog about fashion; Felix Salmon will blog on finance, and Tim Swanson, formerly of Premiere, will have an entertainment news blog. The magazine will appear on April 16, and the Web site will go live the same day.

We mourned when Larry Ribstein gave up his weekly eviscerations the Sunday ramblings of Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times columnist Gretchen Morgenson—better known to DealBreaker readers as Gret-Gret.. This week, however, even Larry couldn't stay away (as Joe pointed out this morning in Opening Bell). And the errors of this past Sunday's column on the subprime mortgage "meltdown" shone so brightly that they are attracting critics like moths to a flame.

(Whoa. That's the wrong metaphor. Because the moths get burned by the flame when what we mean is that they're burning Gret. Hmmm. Let's try that again.)

And the errors of this past Sunday's column are attracting critics like bees to honey.

(Wrong. Bees like honey. Honey is sweet. Why don't we just quit it with the clichés? One more try.)

And the errors of this past Sunday's column seem to have provided a bright target for the slings and arrows of outraged critics.

(That will have to do.)

One our favorite business writers is called Felix Salmon. (We've known him for years and that's his real name.) His take on Gret-Gret gets right to the heart of what's wrong with so many of her columns: she doesn't seem to know what she's talking about.

The world is full of people desperate to know what Gretchen Morgenson thinks about the market in mortgage-backed securities, or MBSs. The problem is that her column last week on the subject is hidden behind the Times Select firewall. So we can all be very grateful that she has now rewritten it, at even greater length, and republished it under a "News Analysis" slug. (No firewall!) The headline? "Crisis Looms in Market for Mortgages".

Or, you know, we can ignore it, on the grounds that Morgenson adduces no evidence whatsoever that any crisis is looming at all. For one thing, she doesn't seem to understand the difference between two entirely different types of investment: equity in subprime mortgage originators, on the one hand, and debt backed by pools of subprime mortgages, on the other. It's certainly true that originating subprime mortgages does not seem to have been a very good business to invest in over the past year or so. But Morgenson never connects the dots and explains why that means that the market in subprime MBSs is likely to implode.

But, you know, understanding your subject matter or clearly explaining it to readers is apparently not a qualification for a Pulitzer.

Is there a looming crisis in the mortgage market? [FelixSalmon.com]

Is all not well in the house of CNBC? We've mentioned again and again the love that CNBC executives, and their bosses at GE, have for Maria Bartiromo. But is their love unrequited? San Antonio Express-News business columnist David Hendricks writes that Maria didn't even so much as mention the network at a recent speech in San Antonio.

Curiously, it was difficult to know from her speech Tuesday who employs Bartiromo: I don't remember her mentioning CNBC even once. She was busy instead dropping the names of the people she has interviewed, from President Bush to Bill and Melinda Gates and the heads of high-powered private equity firms.

So is Maria giving CNBC the cold-shoulder?

Actually, that excerpt is probably unfair to Maria and Hendrick's column, which makes it abundantly clear that she's "an asset to business journalism" who understands the financial world better than many "award winning" business journalists, including "how private-equity acquisitions of public companies boost the value of U.S. corporations." He just wishes she'd cut-out the "corporate promotional appearances"—which is the most polite way of describing all that time she spent with Citigroup executives we've seen in weeks.

Bartiromo avoids the difficult questions in San Antonio [San Antonio Express-News via Talking Biz News]

You might have noticed that we've been hammering away today at the backdating reporting of the Wall Street Journal. In fact, we've been beating up on Friday's front-page story so much that we've haven't even had time to get to the breathless reporting in today's Journal.

So what's got us all hot and bothered? Well, to be frank, it's the news that the Journal's reporters are winning awards for their reporting on backdating. We're not picking on lightweights here. We think the public is entitled to a little better from prize winners.

But it's not really the news that a few fellas at the Journal won something called a George Polk Award that has us up-in-arms. It's the possibility—perhaps even the probability—that the Journal's reporters might win a Pulitzer for their reporting on backdating. There's little doubt that the Journal is gunning for a Pulitzer here. And before the awards are handed out, the laurels placed on brows and the round of congratulations start, we thought we'd try to put things in perspective and correct a few errors.

Once they give the boys a Pulitzer it'll be even harder to get the real story of backdating out.

Reporters for Journal Win George Polk Award [$$] [Wall Street Journal]

How many misunderstandings can the Wall Street Journal's reporters pack into one article on backdating? We're still counting.

Our earlier post focused on how the Journal's report was misleading about the rationales for awarding stock options and the how backdating affects those rationales. But the reporters also seem to misunderstand the process of how stock options are awarded.

The reporters note that the chief financial officer of Broadcom urged that the options awards to executives be dated on December 24th. They then add:

They were, and that was fortunate for recipients. Broadcom's share price rose 23% between the two dates. The pretense that the options had been granted on the earlier date made them extra valuable.

That sure is snide and sounds clever. But it rests on a very fundamental misunderstanding of how options are awarded. It's not very likely the executives of Broadcom was destined to get a set amount of options, and so pricing them on an earlier date inflated their pay. It's far more likely that the executives at Broadcom were going to receive total compensation packages worth a certain amount, and that dating the option grants earlier just allowed the company to issue fewer options.

The explicit nature of the chief financial officer's email makes it very clear that the intent was not to somehow conceal how much the executives were getting paid. Anyone with a pencil, a calculator and a piece of paper could figure out what the options granted on January 4th, but priced at December 24th's share price, were worth. This, in fact, is one of the advantages of backdating—pegging the grant to a date in the past on which the price is known, makes it easier to know how much the options are worth. Pegging them to a moving number—such as the share price on whatever day the options are actually awarded—makes the calculation more difficult.

What's more, a phenomenon that economists call the "endowment effect" seems to affect executive decision making here. Executives prefer options that seem to be already worth something on the date granted, even if those options will take years to vest and may actually be worthless (if the stock goes down) by then. In short, Broadcom's chief financial officer might have known he could cleverly shortchange the executives by granting them "in the money" backdated options since they would consider these worth more than even straight cash. It certainly would allow the company to preserve more of its cash.

There's another point worth making. Presumably the actions of the executives helped cause whatever it was that pushed Broadcom's stock price up 23% in 11 days. Is it totally unfair that they might expect to be able to benefit from this explosion in shareholder value? Or do we want to create incentives for executives to hold-off on releasing positive news about their companies until after they receive their options?

[Editors Note: Okay. We might be getting a little "flood-the-zone"-ish when it comes to Friday's big, front-page Wall Street Journal article on backdating. This is our third post on it. We'd like to say that we've covered it all but we haven't. More in a few moments.]

Probes of Backdating Move To A Faster Track
[$$] [Wall Street Journal]

That Wall Street Journal story we mentioned earlier opens with this tantalizing lede. Too bad it is so misleading.

On Jan. 4, 2002, the chief financial officer of Broadcom Corp. tapped out an email about stock options to his chief executive and others.

"I VERY strongly recommend that these options be priced as of December 24," he wrote.

They were, and that was fortunate for recipients. Broadcom's share price rose 23% between the two dates. The pretense that the options had been granted on the earlier date made them extra valuable.

It also violated the rationale of stock options. They give recipients a right to buy stock in the future at the price when the options are granted, so that recipients can profit only if the price of their company's stock goes up. Setting a lower "exercise price" for the options gives recipients a head start on profiting.

That last paragraph bears re-reading because it is, at the very least, quite contentious for a front-page news story. Remember, this isn't a Ben Stein rant or a Gretchen Morgenson screed. So it unfortunate that the reporters make the mistake of stating the pro-criminalization, anti-backdating case as a matter of fact.

Backdating does not necessarily "violate the rational of stock options." This is a point we made a long, long time ago. First of all, even the reporters statement of "the rationale" is questionable. There are many rationales for granting stock options. In addition to tying employee compensation to stock performance, stock options also allow a company to provide compensation to valuable employees without diminishing their immediate cash position. What's more, some employees prefer stock options to immediate cash payments because they want to participate in the potential upside growth of their companies. There are also powerful tax-incentives for accepting stock-options, since they are usually not taxed until a gain is realized.

More importantly, none of these rationales (save, perhaps, for the tax-deferment) is violated by granting backdated stock options. This should even be obvious for the rationale preferred by the Journal reporters. Holders of backdated stock options may have a "head start" on their options—the options are actually in the money when granted—but they still must usually hold the options for years before they can be cashed in, and their profits still increase with the rise of the share price. Their incentives are thus aligned exactly with those of other shareholders.

Backdating involved violations of some very complex accounting rules. And reporters, investigators and shareholders certainly have every right to expect companies not to play fast and loose with these rules. But it doesn't help the public understanding of this mess to paint backdating as some sort of corporate looting or embezzling or to pretend that backdating stock options destroys the very rationales for granting them in the first place.

Probes of Backdating Move to Faster Track [$$] [Wall Street Journal]

Last week we wondered aloud if recent comments coming from the Securities and Exchange Commission's enforcement division signaled that the regulators might be backing away from criminalizing the backdating of stock-options. The comments certainly seemed aimed at lowering expectations that the numerous investigations by federal authorities into the controversial practice would produce dozens, if not hundreds, of criminal cases.

On Friday, however, investigators seemed to answer our query about whether they were backing off with a loud and unequivocal: "Not a chance." The Wall Street Journal ran a story on the front page under the headline "Probes of Backdating Move to Faster Track."

Probes of Backdating Move to Faster Track [$$] [Wall Street Journal]

The rather under-whelming reaction in much of the media to the revelations about top dog CNBC reporter and "Closing Bell" anchor Maria Bartiromo's relationship with former Citigroup honcho Todd Thompson—today, for instance, the New York Post's Keith Kelly reveals that both Business Week and Reader's Digest are keeping Bartiromo on board as a columnist—brings to mind one of the first lessons we ever learned in journalism ethics.

It was Spring, the early nineteen nineties, Bill Clinton had recently been elected and we found ourselves living in Washington, DC and considering a career in political journalism. (We eventually recovered from that brief enthusiasm.) One day we were having lunch with an old-school newspaper editor who was, if we recall correctly, then working at Reader's Digest.

We asked about the "revolving door" problem—people from the political side becoming journalists once they are their patrons were voted out of office. Chris Matthews is now a prominent example at the type, but Pat Buchanan, Tim Russert and countless others have gone through the door. Some of them seem to be perpetually spinning in and out.

The weathered editor told us that he thought the problem was overblown. What's more, he said, former political staffers might have a kind of expertise and familiarity with the relevant players that a pure outsider would lack. They might add to the public understanding.

Which isn't to say that it couldn't be problematic. The real test was weather the journalists were truly independent of their old political ties or still serving or giving the appearance a politician or party.

"I don't care if you've got clowns covering the circus," the editor told us, "Just as long as they aren't still fucking the elephants."

Editors Still Sweet On Money Honey Maria [New York Post]

We'll admit it. One of the things we missed while we were hospitalized and recovering from our hostile merger with the front end of a fast-moving automobile was reading Gretchen Morgenson on Sundays. Her fevered columns may have forced law professor Larry Ribstein to give up his regular critiques of her work—apparently he sleeps better now that he doesn't read her—but it's just the sort of thing we need to get our blood flowing after a Saturday night of self-medication and saloon socializing.

This week Gret-Gret certainly didn't disappoint. She's in celebration mode. Her buoyant mood has arisen from her discovery of a recent speech by Wachtel, Lipton, Rosen & Katz named partner Marty Lipton warning that the current environment of criminal penalties attaching to corporate scandals may be diminishing the willingness of qualified individuals to serve as directors on corporate boards. This is indeed a difficult question—how do you encourage more responsible corporate government without making the job of a corporate director so unappealing that you diminish the quality of the willing candidates—but not one that has much of hold on Gret-Gret's mind.

What's got her excited is the simple fact that Marty Lipton—and presumably the corporate managers who are his clients—are worried. And whatever makes the Liptons of the world lose sleep is bound to bring ecstasy to Gret-Gret. And that's a bit sad. Rather than attempting to find solutions to the very real problems of corporate governance and board accountability, it's clear that Gret-Gret looks at this as a contest between the Good Guys and the Bad Guys.

But, to be honest, watching Gret-Gret fight with Lipton makes us feel like a bit like we're looking through the farm house window at George Orwell's pigs playing cards with the farmers. There's certainly not much to choose between them, and no matter who wins we're pretty sure it's not going to benefit investing public.

Oh, and we're sorry. But unless you are a "Times Select" subscriber, you can't read the column yet. It's hidden behind a the New York Times' brilliant attempt to jam its own signal. Something called "Times Select."

Update: Even Professor Ribstein couldn't resist Gret-Gret this week!

Memo to Shareholders: Shut Up [$$] [New York Times]

We’ve got enough math nerd neurons firing in our heads to actually enjoy reading stories about new ways of doing financial modeling. What we don’t especially enjoy is articles about new models that rely on vague biological metaphors and don’t tell us anything about how the models actually work. In fact, we have a word for these articles—useless.

Today’s Reuters story on a “neural network” computer models being developed by Germany's Commerzbank AG is a good example of useless. It lets Commerzbank's head of alternative investment strategies, Mehraj Mattoo, rave about a computer model that “tries to take everything into account and learn as it goes along.” Wow. Sounds exciting. How’s it do that? Oh, what, never mind. Pay no attention to the little man behind the curtain.

It’s understandable that money managers wouldn’t want to disclose much about how their financial model works. But should journalists really just print the managers bragging about the models? Would they let a politician get away with saying he had a perfect plan to keep Social Security solvent but couldn’t disclose it? A football team manager announce a new strategy that he wouldn’t discuss but he was sure would win?

Eh. Maybe we're being too hard on the Reuters story. The neural network financial modeling thing does sound cool.

Neural networks invade hedge fund industry [Reuters]

Condé Nast has finally announced the name of its new business magazine. "Portfolio" is scheduled to debut with the May 2007 issue, which will actually appear sometime in late April. For now, though, you can look at some pretty pictures on its website.

The new mag will be edited by Joanne Lipman, formerly deputy managing editor of The Wall Street Journal.

Condé Nast New Portfolio [New York Post]