by Dimitri C. Michalakis

“If you can wait a second, hold on,” says the bubbly anchor and begins to count, “… 8:30, 9:10, 9:20, 9:30…” more counting—“by the way, I go on as it comes...” more counting “…twenty (television) shots a day!” she announces. “Then I have to do radio, and I do FOX News Radio for 145 cities. And then I do a market wrap at the end of the day and I tell you what happened here today and what to look for tomorrow. And I do our web shows—we have our FOX Business Live show—so roughly twenty times a day, plus FOX Radio hits, plus web hits.”

But she wouldn’t change a thing about the grueling pace that makes her omnipresent on all FOX business media practically all day.

“I always say I skip to work, I never drag,” she says, practically skipping on the phone as she talks from the exclusive FOX booth on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange. “And even when I go in at 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. or 5 a.m.--I’ve worked every shift in television—I honestly love coming to work. The adrenaline gets you, the excitement of the market gets you from the people you work with—everybody at FOX and all the traders you work with—they’re wonderful.”

She says now is a particularly great time to report from the floor as the market picks up. “We’re up fifty percent from our March lows. We’re back to a 10, 000 Dow and it’s a really great time, not just for market people, but for regular folks who have 401Ks and IRAs. They really got hit hard when the Dow went down to 6500. Now we’re back and it’s great news.”

That’s better than two years ago when the FOX Business Network first went on the air. “I was standing here and talking about the Dow at 14,000, which then went down to 6,500 and I used to stand here and say, ‘More layoffs: General Electric, Pfizer, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs—they’re all cutting jobs.’ Now it’s such a different picture. Now I stand here and say, ‘New 52 week high for Amazon, and Microsoft, and Macy’s, and JP Morgan, and Halliburton’—it’s a much better environment.”

And it’s an environment that she loves. “The stock market is really exciting,” she says, excited just talking about it. “I’m not kidding, if you felt my pulse now—it’s soaring! You can see gains and losses in the blink of an eye. Even the other day: we were up 100 points and one trader said he went to the bathroom, and by the time he got back to the floor we were down 100 points!—we had a 200 point swing in the middle of the day all on the movement of the dollar…I can’t explain it. It’s just fabulous. I feel like the luckiest journalist in the world to be down here.”

Before joining FOX, Petallides was an anchor for Bloomberg Television reporting from the Stock Exchange, and before Bloomberg, she was an assistant producer for CNBC, where she produced daily floor reports from the NYSE. Before CNBC, she was a segment producer for Dow Jones Television's The Wall Street Journal Report with Consuelo Mack and international programs the Asian Business News and European Business News.

“I have a long resume,” she says, “but I really love working at FOX, because there’s something for everybody on this channel. It’s smart enough for people who are really in tune to the jargon and the inside scoop of the market, and it also presents information in a great useful way for folks who are less business savvy: It’s fun, it’s smart, it’s not demeaning. We’re never talking at you, I’m talking to you. I’m telling you what I’m hearing. It’s an exciting place to be and I love it.”

FOX also has a leg up on the competition because it is the only media outlet with a booth on the trading floor.

“FOX was so smart to have their booth on the floor,” she says, “the first booth ever on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. I’m actually sandwiched between two trading booths! The other media, NBC, Bloomberg, CNN, they’re all up on top on the balconies. FOX Business is different—I sit on the floor all day--right here, where traders are running by and yelling, ‘I’m buying EXXON! I’m selling Citigroup!’ And I’m standing here and I can quickly plug in the stock to see what’s going on. I can talk to these guys, and get it first on FOX and that’s an advantage.”

That’s a heady atmosphere for a business reporter, but she takes a tip from the traders around her: “These guys kid me: the hotter the fire, the cooler the cucumber, because it tends to be insane here and I have to keep a level head. If everything is running hot or running high or running low—if everything is falling--you don’t want to say there’s panic in the market, because things might turn around just like that.”

Besides being married to her work, Petallides is married to Manhattan dentist Nicholas Tsiolas and has two boys, Eric, 7, and Michael, 5. “It can be tough, because Nick and I lead busy lives,” she says. “But my mom baby sits.” (Her mother is Fannie Holliday, a founder of the Greek language daily Proini, and her father is John Petallides, who owns several companies including U.S. Amfax, a New York-based telemarketing and promotions company.) “I was an athlete in college and I love playing sports with them. And—“ of course “—I brought them to the New York Stock Exchange and they loved it.”

Almost as much as their mother.

“I look at the outside of the New York Stock Exchange and it feels like home,” she rhapsodizes. “I love when I know I only have thirty seconds till I’m on. I love updating my latest graphics because I don’t want them to be old. I love getting the news fast, I love talking to these traders—it’s really fun!”