> but they know what they need to do to meet research compliance requirements.
Yes sir. And they were caught wrong footed. But I mean, the number of these "misdemeanours" they get away with has always been pretty high so it isn't surprising. They almost got away with 1MDB for fuck's sakes.
I don't know where you worked, but I was buy side, so I had full freedom to publish my own recommendations. However, my PM was a smart man and always wanted me to get on a call with the sell side analyst if I was disagreeing with him. But since I was very junior, a senior analyst used to lead the call (and was already tuned into the stock and following my models on the side because he was my mentor). Man the senior analyst (an ex sell side analyst from goldman) used to grill the ever loving shit out of the sell side guy on the call. Threw him charts from my report, charts from bloomberg / factset, news links etc on email while he had him on the call.
Like 3-4 emails exchanged just when we were on the phone. Sell side guy was also highly fucking experienced. Never fucking gave ground and admitted that he was being forced by the brokerage to mark it a buy. Always a stalemate and it was wondrous to me when I was new.
Then I understood they both knew it was going to be a stalemate long before the call starts. My senior analyst is cursing the sell side guy to me, and the sell side guy is probably cursing the two of us to his colleagues. We both agreed to disagree, but he never could fully justify his position in my eyes.
We had total freedom to give any rating we could justify. We downgraded banking names under coverage, or gave unfavorable ratings to some of the names that bankers wanted us to add to coverage. These sometimes led to calls from banking (moderated and monitored by compliance) demanding to know why we did such a thing, or my director of research receiving emails from companies that thought they deserved more favorable ratings that would personally insult my team. We nevertheless made the right calls for our investors to the best of our abilities, and I'll always stand by that.
I've been on a bunch of aggressive calls and they always get my pits sweaty. I was on a few with the senior analyst I started working under that I really remember. We had a contentious sell call on a stock and one of their top 10 holders wanted to speak with us. We hopped on the conference call and they brought every one of their covering analysts, PM's, and even a trader onto the call just to try and talk us out of our rating. It was one of those calls where we knew neither side would find an agreement, but ultimately we both got a better understanding of where our disagreements lay, which helped better inform both sides about debates in the stock. The cursing and aggression from these clients made that call especially tough.
On a different note, I found the former sell-side turned buy-side analysts to be the toughest clients to work with. They know exactly how the research game is played, but several seemed to have an especially large chip on their shoulder and wanted to badger the sell-side guys since they had taken that beating for years.
> On a different note, I found the former sell-side turned buy-side analysts to be the toughest clients to work with. They know exactly how the research game is played, but several seemed to have an especially large chip on their shoulder and wanted to badger the sell-side guys since they had taken that beating for years.
Very, very accurate from what I've seen. Especially from the former aggressive sell side people like the senior analyst I worked with. They somehow get redirected to the most aggressive current sell side people as well (despite stock coverage being assigned however).
My coverage finally didn't have too many contentious names (I took up defensives in fucking 2014 thinking the bull market was ending), but the ones that did had very mellow sell side guys. Whereas the sell side guys handling big tech and consumer discretionary names were aggressive as fuck. For instance, the same senior analyst took like 2-3 hours reading up on my stock before a sell side call, but with the consumer discretionary guy, he used to read up from the night before because (a) the stocks were more complicated, and (b) the sell side guys for these stocks were always super charged dudes with a ton of info directly at their fingertips. You needed to adjust your entire demeanour to deal with them differently.
Yes sir. And they were caught wrong footed. But I mean, the number of these "misdemeanours" they get away with has always been pretty high so it isn't surprising. They almost got away with 1MDB for fuck's sakes.
I don't know where you worked, but I was buy side, so I had full freedom to publish my own recommendations. However, my PM was a smart man and always wanted me to get on a call with the sell side analyst if I was disagreeing with him. But since I was very junior, a senior analyst used to lead the call (and was already tuned into the stock and following my models on the side because he was my mentor). Man the senior analyst (an ex sell side analyst from goldman) used to grill the ever loving shit out of the sell side guy on the call. Threw him charts from my report, charts from bloomberg / factset, news links etc on email while he had him on the call.
Like 3-4 emails exchanged just when we were on the phone. Sell side guy was also highly fucking experienced. Never fucking gave ground and admitted that he was being forced by the brokerage to mark it a buy. Always a stalemate and it was wondrous to me when I was new.
Then I understood they both knew it was going to be a stalemate long before the call starts. My senior analyst is cursing the sell side guy to me, and the sell side guy is probably cursing the two of us to his colleagues. We both agreed to disagree, but he never could fully justify his position in my eyes.