Analysts Should Have Seen McKesson HBOC Coming

McKesson HBOC (MCK Quote) stinks! Hey, no kidding. But what bothers me more than anything about this blowup is that smart people for years told me that I should watch HBOC and questioned how it could be doing so well in a business that got tougher and tougher for everyone else. Yet the analyst community never smelled a thing.

After Cendant (CD Quote), I figured that anybody who does something that seems like magic is doing magic. But the Street just doesn't think that way. It never questions.

I don't want to point fingers, but I think it will begin to be required of all good analysts to question when one company is doing well and everyone else is doing poorly, whether something funny might be going on.

Waste Management (WMI Quote) was growing much faster than its cohorts. Much much faster. So was Cendant. So was HBOC.

Some companies ride organic waves of growth. Other companies have unbelievable management that can manage downturns seamlessly. Others, when confronted with a slowdown that will disappoint the analyst community, do things that they shouldn't do.

Someone, some analyst somewhere, has to be able to spot this ahead of time. Until then, we will have more of these. We know from the way the prosecution works, we can't look to the government alone to stop this stuff. We need the smart guys on the sell side to flag it.

Help us, sell side. Help us.

Random musings: I don't like to respond to all the lies that are told about me in the press or in the chat rooms, but the most egregious ones -- well, that's a different story. The Iridium (IRID Quote) story the other day was real, and I am getting my money back.

I can't tell you how many people have speculated that I was short Iridium. If you think I was you are lying to yourself or libeling me. Heck, I was long Motorola (MOT Quote) at the time the piece was published. What a shame that everybody believes people write negative things only to profit from the short side. I wrote a negative story about Iridium because it almost ruined my vacation with my family. That's more important to me than anything.