meet the analyst who crunched a giant, page-14

Hot,

Fair call. However, taking your point about these guys having the industry data, market data, market contacts, industry contacts and company contacts, wouldn't you then give him the benefit of the doubt? I mean, these guys are peered before releasing these analyses. Fine then...blame the whole of Citi.

Ok. Lets remove ourselves from AIO for a second and have a look at how the broader market has been affected. Lets look at MFS, OCV, BNB, CER, CNP...etc etc. Can you point to me a situation where an analyst has pre-warned investors about the dodgy-ness of any one of those companies?

I remember when all the above started falling to pieces and then folks would come out on HC and b*tch and moan that analysts only downgraded these stocks *after* a major negative event.

So, effectively its a lose lose situation for an analyst - downgrade early and you get impaled for SP destruction; downgrade after a stock has bombed and you still get impaled for not forewarning investors.

At the end of the day, I personally don't pay much attention to analysts - their take is based on a snapshot at any one time. This is ultimately flawed especially when the markets, fiscal and monetary policy are changing at a very rapid rate.