Research Report
Categories: Marketing
Wall Street stock brokerages have their analysts write these all the time. Buy Disney. Sell Coke. Hold cash for now. Beware The Inverting Yield Curve (original title of Moby-Dick).
Why do they write research reports? To drum up business. To be a thought leader in the space. To provoke a response from the companies with whom they want to do banking business. Research reports on Wall Street are kinda like marketing vigs with a soft-sell approach. Write something totally wrong and there's no culpability for being wrong, as there would be on the buy side (i.e. the people actually responsible for investing the money; they'd be fired). Write something awesome and spot-on accurate? There's modest reward. Why modest? Well, the opiner took little risk. If they were wrong about a buy recommendation, nothing bad happened to them, so why should something great happen to them if they're right? And if a stockbroker's analyst writes good report after good report after good report, what happens? They get hired away by the vastly more lucrative buy side, where they end up generating alpha for a hedge fund and learning how to whine about taxes.
Good gig if you can get it.
