Take Alexis Glick. After seven years of working her way through the ranks of Morgan Stanley's sharp-elbowed equity traders, Glick last year was named head of the firm's trading operations on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange -- the first woman to hold such a position at a major brokerage house. Now she's hanging it up to become a full-time correspondent for financial news network CNBC's morning Squawk Box. Glick, who will report on institutional traders as they prepare for each day, acknowledges that she is a news-biz neophyte. In 1995­'97 she cohosted Technology in Review, a Saturday-morning show on Talk America Radio, taking the spot as a lark after meeting host Carl Abrams at the 1994 Democratic National Convention. "But that had basically no audience," she says. "I'm truly a virgin at this."

So why leave a plum, high-paying job to take a flier on something you've never done before? "That's a good question. So many of my colleagues have been asking me the same thing," says Glick, adding that the worst bear market since the Great Depression isn't what triggered her career change. "I started doing interviews with CNBC last June or July and sort of caught the bug. I view it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do something very different, yet something I'm very comfortable with."