How to Get Revenge on Wall Street

Let's say you're a Citigroup(C Quote) brokerage customer, and two years ago, at the urging of your broker, you bought a bunch of WorldCom shares. Your broker iced the deal by bragging about how the firm's hotshot telecom analyst, Jack Grubman, kept predicting the stock was going to the moon.

Two years later, your investment in WorldCom is practically worthless, as the telecom giant struggles to emerge from bankruptcy. Grubman, meanwhile, has been drummed out of the securities business -- exposed as being nothing more than a Wall Street version of a snake-oil salesman.

It's a situation that describes the predicament facing many investors who got burned buying stocks based on Wall Street hype, whether they got hit by Grubman's questionable turnabout on AT&T(T Quote) or one of the more outlandish buy recommendations on Qualcomm(QCOM Quote), Amazon(AMZN Quote) or JDS Uniphase(JDSU Quote). ...