Fast Money Ratings Fall…

Zero Hedge writes about CNBC in general and Fast Money in particular…(via J$)

The implications of this are major: as more and more of the penny-trading crowd grow disenchanted with the current regime, look for wide-ranging implications, including both majors drop in retail brokerage volumes, and in the popularity of momentum-trader focused media.

A good example of the latter are the plummeting ratings of CNBC’s 5pm staple Fast Money, long-focusing not on value investors (granted for the most part those tend to see right through CNBC’s agenda), but on daily and even minutely momentum traders. According to Nielsen Media, the drop in the show’s demo between Q2 of 2009 and Q2 of 2010, has been a dramatic 28%, from 75k to 54k. Sequentially, this has also been true, as the drop from May (67k in demo) to June (50k) is a comparable 25%. It is possible to claim that some of the May’s abnormal viewers were due to the excess market volatility, but it certainly does not explain the plunge from Q2 2009, when following the March 666 crash, the market was a momentum trader’s paradise between April and June, yet quiet on all other counts. On the other hand, perhaps we are reading too much into it – controlling for general viewership during the CNBC Business Day segment (5am to 9pm), indicates an identical plunge in broader CNBC ratings from Q2 ’09 to Q2 ’10 in the demo: -28%. Maybe it is not so much a loss of momentum trading viewers, as a general and ongoing disappointment with CNBC’s deteriorating content. Also, perhaps CNBC should have thought twice before parting ways with Dylan Ratigan who was the life and soul of Fast Money, and now has a much more successful activist program on MSNBC.