“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.]