- What Is a Wall Street Securities Analyst?
- Wall Street Analysts Are Bad at Stock Picking
- Opinion Rating Systems Are Misleading
- Research Never Contains an Analyst's Complete Viewpoint
- Wall Street Has a Congenitally Favorable Bias
- Downgrades Are Anguishing, Arduous, and Rare
- Most Downgrades Are Late; the Stock Price Has Already Fallen
- Buy and Sell Opinions Are Usually Overstated
- Wall Street Has a Big Company Bias
- Brokerage Emphasis Lists Are Not Credible
- Stock Price Targets Are Specious
- The Street Orientation Is Extremely Short-Term
- Analysts Miss Titanic Secular Shifts
- Street Research Is Unoriginal; Opinions Conform
- Analyst Research Is Valuable for Background Understanding
- A Lone Wolf Analyst with a Unique Opinion Is Enlightening
- The Best Research Is Done by Individuals or Small Teams
- Overconfident Analysts Exhibiting Too Much Flair Are All Show
Research Never Contains an Analyst’s Complete Viewpoint
Because reports are in the public domain and are read by all the analyst’s disparate audiences, particularly negative or controversial content is watered down, or modulated. The degree of our skepticism, aspects of a company that are unclear but highly suspect, untrustworthy management, lack of confidence in estimates, anything edgy, doubtful, any wariness—none of this gets put into an analyst’s research report. If it did, legal compliance would edit it out anyway. Reports get such scrutiny that analysts are careful; they hold back and reserve the touchier, conjectural content for direct conversations when they can tailor it to a specific institutional client. An analyst’s body language or subtle leaning on a stock is never revealed in writing. Although analysts are no longer legally able to have a stance that conflicts radically with the one portrayed in the report, there is much left to be read between the lines.