I love The Star and admire the quality of most of the work, but sometimes it falls face down in the mud.
Such was the case Saturday with paper’s treatment of the pivotal role that Waddell & Reed might have played in the recent 998-point plunge in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
The story was buried on A-14 under a two-column headline titled “Waddell’s drop-off linked to reports” — a headline that, in itself, makes little sense. Compare that to The New York Times’ handling of the same story.
In The Times, the story led the business section, under a strong and unequivocal headline that read, “Kansas Mutual Fund Identified as Trader in Market Plunge.”
That headline tells the reader, in no uncertain terms, “This is a big deal.” The Times’ story fingered Waddell & Reed, a 70-year-old mutual fund company based in Overland Park, as the main culprit in the Dow Jones plunge on May 6.
In the space of 19 minutes that day, Waddell & Reed sold 75,000 “e-mini futures contracts” — contracts that are tied to the value of the S&P 500 index. Those sales triggered many additional sales, clogging trading channels “like water draining into a narrower and narrower funnel,” as The Times’ story aptly put it.
The Star’s story, by contrast, lacked detail and sharp focus.
Both stories quoted or paraphrased Waddell & Reed’s attempt to dismiss the significance of the 75,000 contract sales by saying it was all “part of the normal operation of our flexible portfolio funds.” Unlike The Times, however, The Star did not offer important contextual information: Earlier in the week, the chairman of the commodity Futures Trading Commission had said at a Congressional hearing that during the crucial time period on May 6, a single futures trader accounted for about nine percent of trading volume in the e-mini futures market.
On Friday, that trader was identified, and it was Waddell & Reed. That prompted alerts to sound at The Times’ offices in New York City. At 18th and Grand, however, the disclosure apparently generated little more than a yawn, judging by the ensuing story.
By any measure, the news should have resulted in a front-page story in Saturday’s Star. But nope, it was watered down and buried, and The Star’s Business Desk didn’t muster enough initiative for the story to warrant a local by-line. The story was credited, instead, to “staff and wire reports.”
I’ve written before how The Star has some “sacred cows,” such as The Plaza and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, which the editors are reluctant to cast in a negative light. From the looks of the story at hand, one might think that Waddell & Reed is in the same category. But that’s not the case. Waddell & Reed gets no passes; it is fair game and has taken its share of pummeling in the newspaper.
No, this looks like a case of simple editorial laziness. Who’s to blame? Well, you can start with Business Editor Keith Chrostowski (unless he was out of the office on Friday), and then you go up the line to Managing Editor Steve Shirk and Editor Mike Fannin, assuming they were working Friday. The way the newsroom handled the story, it might not have been called to the attention of Publisher Mark Zieman, but he looks bad, too — whether or not he was on duty — because, well, he’s the ultimate authority.
All in all, it was a lame, embarrassing effort.
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
I guess this is a failure in my nature, but I just don’t see the big issue here. So much of the trading in the market these days is done by “program trading”, the idea being that computers can (and do) trade faster that humans can react. So, the real story (to my reading) is that Waddell & Reed’s computer reacted to market movement and executed certain trades that it was programmed to trade. The fact that the program executed a large volume of these trades (and, lets face it, probably made money doing so) doesn’t seem to mean much, really.
Unless, of course, you want to hint at dark and evil forces manipulating the entire stock market in the space of 20 minutes. And the very idea that one company, or one computer, could move the entire NYSE seems kind of silly, doesn’t it?
No problem with your nature, Willie…The NYT story doesn’t indicate if these were programmed trades, but, in any event, I don’t think this is a development that editors should try to over-analyze. The fact is that last Tuesday, Gary Gensler, the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading commission, said at a Congressional hearing that during the critical time period, a singles futures trader, which he would not identify at the time, accounted for about 9 percent of trading volume in the most actively traded stock index derivative contract — the 500 e-mini futures contract.
Gensler made it an issue, and a couple of days later the trader was identified as Waddell & Reed. To me, bingo, that’s a pretty good story…and an even bigger story here in Kansas City. Probably nothing dark and evil about it at all, just that a relatively small operation in Overland Park may have triggered a drop that sent shock waves throughout the financial system and cost investors billions of dollars, at least short term.
Jim