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. ...