Smarter Money: Giving Analysts Credit When It's Due

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Hero analysts. Intrepid characters in the tradition of Beowulf and Achilles. Do they exist?Is everyone just a penguin, a lemming, a pencil-pushing public relations person for corporate finance and the companies that pay the big tickets? I don't think there are any Beowulfs out there in the analyst community, but there are plenty of people who each week buck the firmament and make a stand that is probably unpopular internally and is guaranteed to anger the corporate clients from the other side of the ledger.

We are all guilty of overlooking those analysts who take bold action, downgrade and end up making you a ton of money. Here are just a few of these analysts: Paul Sagawa from Sanford Bernstein, with his September downgrade of the equipment makers; the former sell-side hero Ravi Suria, who alerted so many of us to the debt side of the CLECs (man, was he right); Jon Joseph, with his call to get out of the PMC-Sierra (PMCS Quote) crowd, the stocks that were considered to be invulnerable. Can you imagine the bodyguards that guy needed after making that call?

I know I focus too much on those analysts who blow the call. I do it both on television and on RealMoney.com. I want to change that. Now. This morning when I was trashing Wall Street for missing the coming shortfall in Emerson(EMR Quote), a reader immediately reminded me of that great downgrade of Emerson by Michael Regan at a level much higher than when Herb Greenberg started razzing it. ...