| High Profile: David Johnson Stockbroker-broadcaster always gets down to business 03/18/2001 By Bill Marvel / The Dallas Morning News 
Kim Ritzenthaler / DMN
Stock broker and market guru David Johnson talks with customers on his headset/microphone while keeping up with the stock market on a computer screen at his desk at Salomon Smith Barney in Dallas.
|
The stock market has been open barely half an hour and already it's on its knees. For the third Friday in a row, prices are down, down, down.
Meantime, the stockbroker is powdering his nose. He'll apply a little blush, just enough to warm his cheeks. Then, at the last possible second, he'll pivot in his chair to face the camera and deliver the bad news.
"Here it is January 1999 all over again," he says, evoking memories of bear markets past. "Motorola has said it's not going to make its projected earnings and may even report a loss in the second quarter. Sun Microsystems has down-estimated earnings. Word is that the third generation of cellular phones could be pushed off three more years. Polaroid says it's cutting costs. The first thing they're gonna do is blow away 11 percent of their employees."
These days as the stock market stumbles and recovers more often than a drunk after an all-night binge, the bewildered and the uncertain turn for enlightenment – and perhaps a bit of entertainment – to David Johnson. His chirrupy voice, piping away several times a day on KRLD-AM (1080), public radio's Marketplace, TXCN and WFAA-TV (Channel 8), is reassuring even in the Dow's darkest hours. Perpetually cheerful, perpetually bullish, Mr. Johnson always seems to be saying, "Yes, we know the market can be the slag heap of broken fortunes. But isn't it fascinating? Isn't this fun?"
Birth date and place: July 28, 1949, Amarillo, Texas.
Occupation: Multitasker.
Favorite president(s): Tom Engibous (Texas Instruments); Dick Brown (Electronic Data Systems); Ross Perot Jr. (Hillwood Development); Len Roberts (RadioShack); Don Carty (American Airlines); Don Horton (D.R. Horton home building companies); Ebby Halliday (Ebby Halliday Realtors) ... the whole North Texas group.
Favorite movie: The Last Picture Show; The Gods Must Be Crazy
Favorite TV show: The Larry Sanders Show.
My ideal vacation: Hotel Gotthard, Weggis, Switzerland on Lake Lucerne.
I drive a ... convertible.
My hero(es): Our sons, Ben and Sam; it's really tough to grow up today.
Best advice I could give a 20-year-old would be: Don't make any long-term decisions yet. Make mistakes. And kiss a lot of frogs.
My last meal would be: A family dinner with grilled steak, mashed potatoes and English peas.
My trademark cliché or expression: In point of fact.
My worst habit: Not writing stuff down.
My best asset: Working under pressure.
Behind my back, people say: This guy must never sleep. (I do, at least six and a half hours per night.)
Guests at my fantasy dinner party: We have it about three nights a week...with Debbie, Ben and Sam.
I wish I could sing like: Aaron Neville.
If I had a different job, I'd be: A travel agent.
I'm happiest when: Debbie and I are with the kids ... lacrosse games ... traveling, whatever.
If I could change one thing about myself, it would be: I'd have only one chin.
Nobody knows: I never GOT algebra, and I had to take finite mathematics twice.
|
David Brancaccio, producer of public radio's nightly business news program Marketplace, does a lot of public speaking around the country. When the time comes for questions from the audience, the hands go up. The first or second question is always the same, he says: "Tell us about that Dallas stockbroker guy."
The early bird
At an hour when most workers are just pulling into their parking spaces, just clocking in, that Dallas stockbroker guy already has been at his desk at Salomon Smith Barney for two hours, monitoring the market, working the phones, placing orders for clients.
Yes, David Johnson is a real stockbroker. He has worked at the same firm since 1972, when he got out of college. Then it was still E.F. Hutton, six name changes ago.
"I got into the brokerage business that September and watched the market climb to 1000," He says. "Then we had the Arab oil embargo. It was like the Depression."
He has had the same phone number for 25 years. Today at 51 he is vice president-investments and assistant manager of the Dallas office, overseeing accounts worth more than $150 million.
His eighth-floor office looks out over Far North Dallas, over a clutch of high-rise towers and over traffic-clogged LBJ. On a recent gray, rain-soaked Friday, you could look out his window and almost see the house he and his wife, Debbie, just built. That's her picture on the cabinet, next to the snapshots of their sons, Ben, 18, and Sam, 13.They met at a party for Lucy Crow, daughter of developer Trammel Crow. David was a senior at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn., a liberal arts college steeped in the old Oxbridge traditions. Students with a B-or-above average are still required to wear academic gowns to class. Debbie was a junior at Southern Methodist University.
"I liked him because he was older," she recalls. He liked her because she was bright.
On the air
His office also functions as a small but well-equipped radio/television studio, where he broadcasts as many as two dozen reports, interviews and updates a day. Spotlights dangle from the ceiling, a corner video camera focuses on his desk. He wears a headset and a mike, freeing his hands to dial, take notes, scroll stock prices. He has direct phone lines to KRLD and Marketplace. All he has to do is flip a couple of switches, turn on the spots and camera or open the mike, and he's on.
Here's about 60 seconds of his workday: He is just finishing a discussion of market possibilities with a client ("Don't let this money sit around and do nothing. I think missing interest is one of the 10 – no, one of the 11 – deadly sins") when a call comes in from his KRLD producer ("Yo! Johnson here!"). As they talk about his next feed, he is scribbling notes and scanning stock prices on one of the four screens (two computer, two television) over his desk. Meanwhile he's fingering the little black and chrome Nokia cell phone that he calls "my Bible," searching for the phone number of a CEO he wants for an afternoon interview.
He looks like the busy captain of a 747, flying without a co-pilot.
Dual careers
Radio and television have been as constant in David Johnson's life as the stock market. He reported sports for the student radio station in Sewanee, and when he came back to Dallas and went to work full time for E.F. Hutton, a friend talked him into emceeing a Channel 13 pledge drive. In front of the cameras, he was relaxed and witty, a natural, and shortly afterward he was invited to sit in on the station's nightly Newsroom, reporting on business and the market. Soon he had his own show. He was also sharing a Saturday morning sports show on radio with Norm Hitzges, Peter Lesser, Glenn Mitchell and Kent Fannon.
"The most important thing about David," says David Brancaccio, "is that he was an English major at Sewanee. He's a communicator."
On this rainy Friday, he has plenty to communicate. By midday, prices are down around the ankles. "God, there's no place to hide," he says as he watches the unfolding debacle. "The dollar's down, the index is down.
"Boy, this is fascinating," he tells his radio audience a few minutes later.
Chances are, at this moment very few of them are thinking this is fascinating. Ruinous, is more like it. A disaster.
But Mr. Johnson plunges on: "I wish we had a billion more shares volume," he says. "If you're going to have a day like this, you want to have really heavy volume. You want to have the heaviest volume ever, 1.5 billion shares or something like that. You want to just get it out of the system, you know, some kind of purge."
He explains that the market is like a neighborhood where a lot of houses are for sale. Owners keep selling and selling and prices keep falling and falling. Eventually, all the houses are sold.
"After you run out of sellers, the bargain hunters come in," he explains. At that point, the market is in a position to recover.
"A lot of this is psychology," he says. "Because there are real people back there, behind those prices. Portfolio managers are real people."
Disaster averted
Midafternoon, by some miracle, the market has pulled out of its nose dive. Not a complete recovery – the Dow closes about halfway back up to where it began the day. A crash-landing, then. Mr. Johnson now has some good news to report, or at least some better news. "A pretty impressive turnaround," he calls it.
"I must say, we have the feeling of somebody who's been shot at – and missed."
In addition to being a communicator, Mr. Brancaccio says, Mr. Johnson is a superb reporter. His documentary on the decline and fall of Braniff Airways won a gold medal at the New York Film Festival.
"The market lives on news," Mr. Johnson says. He thrives on it.
"It's fun to work a story," he says, "to find out why something is happening, then when I find out, to go out and tell people all about it.
"I wake up thinking, I know something's gonna happen. I know I'll find out what it is. I just gotta be there."
Bucher Lines, a classmate at Sewanee, has maintained a close friendship with Mr. Johnson over the years.
"We made a trip to Puerto Vallarta a few years ago," says Mr. Lines, a "country lawyer" in Quincy, Fla. "The first morning out, there's David Johnson with a couple days of The Wall Street Journal, D Magazine, Newsweek, Business Week and the day's newspapers piled around his feet, sitting in his swimsuit and dark glasses. He's there in his playpen.
"You could just see the steam coming out of his ear. That mind is always going."
You'd think that by now he'd seen it all.
Not so. "David's one of the unjaded people I know," says his longtime friend, sportscaster Norm Hitzges. "He loves going to work. He loves the theater of it."
Mr. Johnson's other great pleasure is travel. He'll take off with his wife or one of the boys to see London or to visit a little town he knows in Switzerland.
Anywhere but Las Vegas, he says. "That's gambling.
"This is not gambling," he says of the stock market. "If you do it right."
Still, Mr. Brancaccio recalls at least one Johnson-inspired gamble.
Mr. Johnson was visiting Los Angeles, and the Marketplace producer took him to the track at Santa Anita for a day at the races.
Mr. Johnson fingered the form, studying it as though it might be a corporate earnings report. Finally he settled on a horse named Freehouse, a long shot with a dubious record, and Mr. Brancaccio hurried off to the betting window.
The horse came in, of course, paying $41.50 on a $5 bet.
|
