A Look Inside A Match Made in Fox News Heaven

Imus devoted the first half of his chat with Jonas Ferris this morning to discussing mutual funds, Jonas’s expertise. The latter half of the interview, however, focused on the mutual discord between Jonas and his wife, Fox Business Network’s own Dagen McDowell.

Jonas runs MaxFunds, a mutual fund rating website that also offers a small investment advisory service. While the site is free, Jonas and his co-founder Jim Skahan also offer a paid newsletter, in which they rate funds using an uncommon approach.

“Our idea was to shed light on the mistakes people make investing in mutual funds, which is usually ignoring fees and chasing performance,” said Jonas.

The MaxFunds rating system highlights underperforming funds in an effort to prevent investors from buying into overrated ones. “I think the rating system works better than all the other rating systems, which are backward-looking,” said Jonas. “They just look at past performance and tend to direct people into funds that have done well, which are often the ones that tend to collapse.”

It was their mutual knowledge about mutual funds that brought Jonas and Dagen together ten years ago, when they were chosen by Fox News to spar about funds on the show Cashin’ In, which still airs Saturdays at 11:30am.

“She’s not on the show anymore,” Jonas pointed out. “So I figure I won the argument.”

Dagen was quick to attribute her absence on Cashin’ In to “scheduling” difficulties, but Jonas noted that his wife was married at the time they met, and that he was not. “That’s usually an indication of who is right and wrong in arguments,” he said.

Dagen, however, maintained that Jonas is crazy, and pointed to an episode yesterday as proof. “I came home from work and there were clothes hanging out on the line in the yard!” said the girl raised in the deep South.

Protesting that he uses it for environmental reasons, Jonas allowed that the connotation of a clothesline is different for him than for his wife. “I grew up on Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Village, so I don’t feel shame about clotheslines on my property,” he said, adding, “When you grew up where Dagen did, you can’t afford the power to dry clothes and you start to feel embarrassed.”

Dagen and Jonas only really see each other on Sundays due to Dagen’s work schedule, and she spends most of that day watching car racing on television while he performs manual labor around the house.   

This past Sunday, after hours spent shoveling gravel around the yard, Jonas recalled Dagen appeared in the doorway clad in a pink robe, Chihuahua in hand. “This is where the fantasy of marrying someone from the South briefly crosses your vision, and you expect to be offered a mint julep in the shade,” he said.

Instead, Dagen wondered when Jonas was going to strip the paint off the copper gutters. “It’s going to be a long week for that man right there,” she told Imus, who didn’t doubt it.

-Julie Kanfer