“I’ve bought and sold a few homes in my lifetime, and the one rule my dad infused into my head was to protect myself by hiring a lawyer for the transaction,” Ernie Varitimos writes for AppleInvestor. “[My father asked], ‘Who’s best interest does the banks lawyer hold, your’s or the bank’s? Who’s paying the lawyers salary, who’s providing them their next deal?’ Well the questions were rhetorical, the answer was obvious. The lawyer holds the bank’s interest first, my interests had to be second to the bank, if it ranked that high.”
Varitimos writes, “So, let’s take the Apple analyst employed by the brokerage that’s holding your money. The same brokerage that only makes money if you initiate a transaction, if you buy or sell stock. The broker doesn’t care whether you buy or sell, he just cares that you do something, and hopefully do a lot of it. Because every transaction includes commission and fees… Look at all the analysts out there, they are hardly ever right, they’re arrogant, smug, dripping with power, and they hold zero responsibility. They are the weathermen of finance. They don’t have to be right. And that’s just fine by the broker.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wondered on April 9th:
“Who’s got less accountability, TV weathermen, Wall Street ‘analysts,’ or ‘upstream component suppliers’ cited by DigiTimes?'”
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Arline M.” for the heads up.]
Serve those who pay .
NEITHER !!
There are no ‘investors’ when analysts talk… Only institutions and traders. Investors – how quaint…
You, me and any other little guy who has less than a billion dollars to ‘invest’ is noise to these people… We don’t count.. We have NO voice.. We should not waste their time…
That’s why WE SHOULD IGNORE THEM AND DO SOMETHING ELSE.
Quick — plug in the word “politician” and you get the same rhetorical questions! Funny how that works — follow the money….
So analysts are just noise and should NOT be listened to or to be read. Soothsayers, Tea-leaf readers, hit-whores and pot-stirrers, nothing more.
Neither. They serve themselves….
And the answer is…they are the financial equivalent of lobbyists and pundits. They are hired guns there to talk down their backer’s competitors.
in capitalism, one only works for whoever pays the most. thus, analysts do not work for the investors. never did. Wall Street has long ago gamed the US market system to favor traders & speculators over stable productive industry.
FOLLOW THE MONEY!
I hate headlines with question marks …. especially when the question is so stupid.