CNBC's Schacknow: Dow Record Wakes up The Dog Days

Stories That Go Bump In The Night
Did you ever wonder how morning shows like "Squawk Box" manage to get guests on the air to talk about stories that broke in the middle of the night, when people aren’t generally awake?

Answer: the producers and anchors get very little sleep and work very hard.

In some ways, we love breaking stories that happen during “off-hours” for the markets. That means they’re fresh for our morning shows, and if they involve a stock’s reaction, it keeps it that much fresher all day.

This happens more often than you might think. Rio Tinto’s bid for Alcanofficially hit the wires as a press release at 2:42am ET Thursday morning. Home Depot’s profit warning earlier this week suddenly came out of nowhere around 4am. Today’s monthly retail sales numbers were led by Costco, which routinely reports before 5am.

Considering it’s a routinely slow period of the year, the news was flowing fast and furious today. Kudos to the Squawkers who somehow manage to get those guests on, even if they have to wake them up to do it!

Dog Days
As noted, we’re in the middle of the dog days of summer, as we like to call them in the news business. There tends to be less breaking news during those times, so any change from the summer slowdown is always welcomed here at your friendly neighborhood Breaking News desk.

Today, we got just that -- in the form of a stock rally, that helped the Dow Jones Industrial Average into record territory for the first time in more than a month. Yes, that doesn’t seem like a long time compared to the more than 6 and a half years between the Dow’s January 2000 record high and the next one, in October 2006. But considering we’d had 49 record closes between the beginning of October and the last record on June 4, this seemed like eons.

There’s a long time cliché on Wall Street about “climbing the wall of worry” that helps stock rallies continue -- the theory being that when everyone is optimistic, that’s when it’s time to bail. And if a wall of worry is what’s needed to propel a stock market rally, we’ve got plenty of bricks, be they subprime problems, earnings slowdowns, a slumping U.S. dollar, or soaring oil prices.

In other words, plenty to keep us occupied until the dog days are over.

The Following Is An Editorial Comment
A heartfelt welcome back to New York’s WCBS-FM. We missed you. Badly!

If you’re into New York radio, you know the whole story. If you’re not, let’s just say financial circumstances and two years worth of upset by music fans helped prompt CBS Radio to reverse a prior decision and restore a beloved format.

Sometimes, the impossible does happen.