The mystery guest was, as the producers of CNBC's Fast Money show had promised, a really big, big man in South Florida -- Miami Heat center Alonzo Mourning -- and he was willing to confide the show's audience of business-news junkies his own secret stock pick: McDonald's.
''They have the best fries in the world,'' he explained.
''Market research!'' murmured an approving Karen Finerman, one of the panel of stock traders who dissect Wall Street's day each afternoon on Fast Money. The audience watching the live telecast from a courtyard at Coral Gables' Biltmore Hotel was not entirely convinced.
''What about Burger King?'' grumbled a woman in the 10th row.
So it went Friday as a thousand Moneymaniacs crowded onto a makeshift set to cheer and occasionally trade jibes with the show's cast during the remote telecast, only the second time Fast Money has taken its quippy daily take on the markets on the road.
The traders handed out autographs and stock tips while the audience brought offerings ranging from a decorated wooden club for trader Jeff Macke, who routinely says bad stocks should be ''beaten with an ugly stick,'' to a large ''Karen for President'' button for Finerman.
''I'm rolling now,'' said Finerman. ``I'm up to 12 votes.''
She can probably count on a good turnout from them -- Fast Money fans are, well, fanatic.
``I love these guys, I watch them all the time, and I wouldn't miss the chance to see them live for anything, `` said Pat Nehrkorn, who drove over from Naples for the show. ``This wasn't really even that much a trip. I once flew to New York to see the show.''
The turnout, double what CNBC had expected, reflected the expanding popularity of TV business news, once little more than a secretive cult for a handful of Wall Street that has turned into a burgeoning growth industry.
Three cable channels -- CNBC, Bloomberg and the Fox Business Network, which went on the air just five months ago -- are warring for viewers, and South Florida has become one of the battlegrounds. Fox Business' Happy Hour, which competes head to head with Fast Money, will do its own live telecast from Miami Beach in two weeks.
''And we announced ours first,'' sniped a Fox Business spokesman Friday.
CNBC, for its part, said all's fair in love and business news.
''What can I say? I love to compete,'' said Susan Krakower, head of strategic programming at CNBC and the creator of Fast Money. ``I think it's wonderful. It leads to better programming and innovative thinking.''
WITHOUT A NET
It leads to some excitement, too, since the already-large number of things that can go wrong in live television roughly quintuples when you're on the road. The audience at the Biltmore, if not necessarily the one at home, got a taste of the working-without-a-net thrill of remote telecasts Friday when a featured telephone interview with former GE chief executive Jack Welch almost went awry moments before it was to air.
As host Dylan Ratigan conferred with a CNBC stage manager about where to stand during the interview, the telephone connection vanished. ''I can't even hear Jack now,'' Ratigan told the manager, his microphone carrying every word to the audience. ``So that seems to be a minor problem, where I stand.''
Welch's voice finally popped on the air -- with a deafening roar until the sound techs got the volume under control -- but Ratigan cheerfully admitted to a reporter that disaster lurks around every corner during remotes, and he doesn't care.
''The first time we did the show from the road, from San Jose, Calif., we lost all connection to the control room in New York for the first 15 minutes,'' he told a Miami Herald reporter during a break. ``We had no idea if we were even on the air. . . . It just makes us look more human. I'm against the extension of the fraudulent impression of perfection.''
HEATING THINGS UP
Aside from the near-miss on the Welch interview, the rest of Fast Money went pretty much according to plan Friday. The show is patterned after a football post-game show, with the players -- in this case, traders -- arguing about what happened and why. And with Friday's 315-point drop in the stock market, they had plenty to argue about. The audience oohed and ahhed appreciatively at the jibes, especially Macke's crack at the news that Boeing lost a big defense deal to a foreign competitor: ``It's a sad day for American pork when we can't even give a $40 billion contract to our own people.''
If anything, the audience wasn't vocal enough for the traders. ''There are about a thousand people here,'' complained trader Guy Adami, ``and they're as quiet as a Miami Heat crowd!''
