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Level the Leverage


Chicago attorney, Brendan Cournane, leads off discussing the political landscape after the Democrats held on to the Senate. Joel Elconin of Benzinga talks transfer portal and NIL in college sports. Kenny Polcari, Chief Market Strategist at SlateStone Wealth and a contributor to Fox Business, joins us to talk $WMT, FTX and much more. Professor of Economics, Dr. Hal Snarr, calls in for the final hour to continue the political discussion before talking economic indicators.

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Guests & Co-Hosts

BRENDAN COURNANE

Brendan Cournane co-hosts the Stocks & Jocks show every Monday morning. He is also a public finance attorney licensed in both Illinois and Arizona. He has practiced law for more than 35 years acting primarily as counsel to issuers of municipal debt (bond counsel, underwriters’ counsel, bank counsel and special counsel). He has served in both the private and the public sectors, having been a partner in major U.S. law firms and as in-house counsel to such entities as the City of Chicago and Chicago Public Schools, as well as General Counsel to the Illinois Finance Authority, one of the nation’s largest issuers of conduit municipal bonds.

JOEL ELCONIN

Joel’s introduction to trading was in the Standard and Poor’s 500 Index futures pit at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Also, during his time at the CME, he was involved in Index Arbitrage as well as trading foreign currency futures and options. From 1994-1999 he was a proprietary trader for Olde Discount Corporation. Following his tenure at Olde Discount, he founded the Detroit office of Bright Trading, LLC. His responsibilities included trader recruitment, orientation and education as well as the day to day management of the office. He held this position office until 2003. Since 2003, Joel has been an independent trader researching and developing proprietary indicators and trading systems for the equities and futures markets. In 2007, Joel joined JC Trading Group as a Market Consultant and trading supervisor. He provides daily market commentary at www.premarketinfo.com. Joel obtained his Bachelor of Art in Political Science from the University of Michigan in 1985. Also, he is a graduate of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Continuing Education Program. He also holds his Series 7 and 63 licenses and is a licensed real estate broker.

KENNY POLCARI

Kenny Polcari joins Stocks & Jocks every Tuesday morning as the Chief Market Strategist at Slatestone Wealth. With over thirty years of executive management experience and over twenty years of leadership in industry advocacy, he is a well-known personality in the financial services business.

Kenny is also a regular contributor and Market Analyst on Fox Business and you can find him featured across their programming schedule.

Early in his career, he built the U.S. equities business at the largest interdealer broker, ICAP, and was among the first traders to go direct to institutional money managers, executing on the opportunities market evolution created, and bringing greater transparency and accessibility to the customer. Before that, Kenny ran the Salomon Brothers New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) division during the nineties bull market and was a part of the team that launched the first electronic order delivery system in the industry. Kenny began his career on the floor of the NYSE in 1985. He served as a member of the exchange for nearly forty years and as a NYSE Governor for more than a decade, representing the interests of institutional asset managers in the global equities markets. Kenny is a passionate speaker with an infectious interest in the markets. He educates investors, market professionals, and business students about the evolution of the modern markets. As a voice on the markets, he first started working with the news media after 9/11, at the request of the NYSE, and became a regular contributor during the financial crisis, developing a reputation for being an advocate for Main Street and the investing public.

Kenny serves on the Board of Directors of the National Organization of Investment Professionals (NOIP), and the Headstrong Project, a nonprofit providing free, world-class treatment to veterans coping with the psychological wounds of war. He has a BSBA in Finance from the Boston University School of Management. Kenny met his wife, Evelyn, on the trading floor in 1983, when she was the first female Latina to become a member of the NYSE, they reside in Palm Beach, FL and have two daughters.

DR. HAL SNARR

Dr. Snarr currently teaches business quantitative methods courses, money and banking, macroeconomic principles and MBA economics and data analysis. He has taught a variety of other courses at Idaho State University, Washington State University, Duke University and North Carolina A&T State University, including college algebra, microeconomic principles, macroeconomic principles, sports economics, intermediate microeconomic theory, elementary business statistics, advanced business statistics, labor economics, mathematical economics, econometrics, money and banking and calculus-based microeconomics.

Snarr enjoys being in the classroom, experimenting with innovative teaching techniques, producing instructional YouTube videos for his highly regarded channel, The Snarr Institute, conducting & publishing research articles, and writing articles for periodicals like the Mises Daily.

Snarr is an active scholar who follows the advice of Mark Twain and Jennifer Egan: “write what you know” or “what you are curious to find out.” He studies the effects of government policy on employment, migration, fertility and participation in public assistance programs. He is skilled at Stata, and uses it to construct panel datasets from the Current Population Survey and policy variables that he codes from various public sources. Snarr recently published his 14th peer-reviewed article, two macroeconomic books, an article in the Mises Daily, and is finishing two books on labor economics. He enjoys sharing his research findings, insights, and policy recommendations in community forums, and newspaper and radio interviews. Snarr is known as Shooting Snarr on Chicago’s Stocks and Jocks morning talk radio show.