Wild Week’s Winners, Losers

What with 554-point drops, 337-point rebounds, and all manner of oscillation in between, it may be hard for anyone to sort out who won and who lost in this week’s unprecedentedly volatile financial markets.

Here’s the early line:

WINNERS:

The Bond Bulls: It’s doubtful that even the most starry-eyed bond fans thought they would see the 30-year Treasury yielding 6.13% by now, but they’ll take it anyway. Bonds have moved in counterpoint to equities all week, so you can count PIMCO, the Newport Beach bond-fund giant, among the big winners in the flight to quality.

CNBC: Nobody loves a shooting war more than CNN, because otherwise, who would watch? For the same reason, no one loves financial turmoil more than CNBC, whose judicious analysts, index graphs and stock-quote crawl replaced ESPN’s regional NASCAR coverage on barroom TVs across the nation. The Christiane Amanpour Award goes to Maria Bartiromo, whose yeoman work giving dispatches from the NYSE floor landed her an appearance on (of all places) “Letterman.”

The Newspapers: The brokerage and mutual fund industries have spent more time and money advising investors not to panic than political handlers do claiming their man “won” the last debate. Millions of those dollars have gone into publishers’ coffers. Maybe that’s why newspaper stocks have outperformed the S&P; 500 all week long.

The NYSE: Among bourses, the winner and still champ. Computerized systems handled 1.2 billion shares Tuesday without a noticeable glitch--as opposed to the gang that still can’t transact straight, otherwise known as Nasdaq. The Big Board is probably the only place in the world where floor brokers are steely enough to have called Monday’s trading “orderly.”

Alan Greenspan: The Fed chief has it both ways: He gets credit for an early warning (remember “irrational exuberance”?) and for delivering a standard whadidhesay? speech Wednesday that allowed listeners to believe he thinks investors should take markets like this in stride.

Small Investors: The Main Street crowd got the best of the Wall Street crowd, buying on Tuesday and riding the market higher after the professionals had sold on Monday. Small investors generally have been bullish for much of the past few years, riding out short-term ups and downs and keeping the faith during the strongest bull market in history. Will they be winners in the long run? Stay tuned.

LOSERS:

Asian Investing: The Asia markets didn’t come into this week exactly smelling like a rose, but they come out of it looking positively squalid. Not only are they suffering daily hits of as much as 18%, they also are being blamed for causing our problems too.

Nasdaq: The “market for the 21st century” should be thankful it’s still got more than two years before having to deliver on that claim. Its systems overloaded under Tuesday’s volume onslaught, leaving market makers without accurate quotes for the last 40 minutes of the day and its composite index un-computed until two hours after the close.

Silicon Valley: Especially the stock-option army. Companies that have gotten away for years with underpaying salaries to their work forces and making it up with stock options are now facing the uneasy prospect of thousands of employees who know how to do the math. Top executives may not get off scot-free as in earlier tech-stock free-falls, because boards and stockholders won’t take kindly to the old dodge of re-pricing out-of-the-money options to make them profitable again. Are you listening, Jerry Sanders?

Online Brokerages: E-Trade, eSchwab and others suffered an embarrassment of riches this week, with the emphasis on “embarrassment.” Many of the Internet brokerages’ customers, who tend to be more aggressive traders than the average, suffered inordinate delays logging on Monday and Tuesday--just the kinds of days they were desperate to hit their prices. The brokerages are promising big system upgrades, and fast--but how will that affect their profitability?

George Soros: Soros Fund Management lost an estimated $2 billion during Monday’s worldwide plunge. Soros’ Quantum Fund, which accounts for almost half of the $20 billion under management, lost 8.97% between Friday night and Monday night--or $1 billion--according to published figures.

Circuit Breakers: They may have worked exactly as planned--at least the NYSE brass says so--but how will we ever know? Anyway, when a one-hour trading halt kicks in with only 30 minutes left in the trading day, who can be surprised that buyers pack up and go home? Look for the threshold for trading halts to be raised to higher numbers than the 350- and 550-point Dow industrial losses now in effect.

Fidelity: The biggest mutual fund company reported incorrect closing prices for 18 of its funds after Tuesday’s rally. The firm blamed Nasdaq, which handles the transmission of prices to newspapers, but it’s had such snafus before; and if you’re one of Fidelity’s millions of customers, do you really want to hear excuses? Fidelity also gets the booby prize for having stuffed many of its funds with huge holdings of the week’s worst stock, Oxford Health Plans, which lost 63.5% of its value on Monday. Hard to come back from that one.