【英语财经】一位前投资银行家的自白 A stockpicker confesses to recommendations you should not buy

All of us who work as research analysts or stockbrokers have made recommendations we would rather not talk about. They come up in conversation at the worst moments, usually when you are sitting in an office in Mayfair explaining to a multimillionaire hedge fund manager exactly where he has got it all wrong. You annoy your host by pushing things too far or appearing a mite too self-satisfied, and he interrupts your stream of thought and inquires, languidly as a viper: “What about your Buy on Amalgamated Widgets?”

You know Amalgamated is down 16 per cent for the quarter to date; all you can do is play for time. Still, as you wait for the awkwardness to end, you fantasise about telling the truth.

It might not have been a straight-forward error; perhaps this was a Brown-Nosed Buy. Career advancement does not come to people who make enemies by saying nasty things about the boss’s top client. Senior people can help you in all sorts of ways. Jack Grubman, a telecoms analyst at Citigroup’s Salomon Smith Barney unit, apparently once raised a rating to suit the bank’s chief executive, who he hoped would help get his children into an exclusive kindergarten. (Sandy Weill denied having done anything wrong.)

Mr Grubman was banned from the industry for life, but sycophancy can cloud your judgment without obviously crossing the line. Perhaps the Amalgamated boss is going to be the keynote speaker at a conference you are organising. You were happy with the Buy recommendation when you sent the invite, but that was two profit warnings ago.

Then there is neglect. You should have downgraded Amalgamated two months ago — and you know it, but you have had results season, the management away day, weeks of work on an initial public offering that never happened.

When you get around to it, you will have to contend with the parlous state of the rest of the industry. All of Amalgamated’s competitors are doing as badly or worse. But your boss has dictated that all recommendations have to be made on a sector-relative basis; one of these widget makers will have to be a Buy. Perhaps more than one: fund managers do not want to talk to analysts about their Hold recommendations.

Bending to such pressure is at least your own silly fault, unlike the Client-Driven Buy. As the fellow opposite you knows full well, Amalgamated is the biggest holding of the biggest hedge fund on your client list. And the manager responsible for that position is an arrogant so-and-so who does not like being disagreed with. Everyone recommends buying Amalgamated because no one wants a storm of nastygrams that would be the consequence of downgrading it. The analysts meet up in pubs with all the other fund managers, and discuss what they really think of Amalgamated. Often they are rather frank about what they think of its biggest holder, too.

The hapless equity analyst is no stranger to embarrassment even when his recommendations are sincere. Perhaps buying Amalgamated when you recommended it would have made perfect logical and financial sense — the business is sound, an obvious catalyst for valuation improvement is just round the corner. Still, it is not working, for reasons you don’t understand. If you were actually managing money, you would have cut losses immediately (or been forced to do so by your risk manager). But you are not. And downgrading a falling stock so soon after upgrading it is embarrassing. So you have stuck with it, dropping your price target a couple of times in the futile hope that nobody will notice. Such stories can probably be told for as many as half of all Buy recommendations. So sensible fund managers do not pay attention to the “Buy/Sell/Hold” in the corner of the research notes, except as a starting point for discussion or a disciplinary device for excessively bumptious brokers.

But these things are still published, and there are still plenty of less sophisticated punters who take the headlines seriously. With the growth of automated “scrapers”, it’s quite possible that changes in published recommendations are as important now as they have ever been. “Nobody takes this stuff seriously” would be a flimsy argument if regulators came knocking after investors had been hurt.

The “Buy/Sell/Hold” headline is both heavily regulated and more or less worthless. Perhaps some courageous stock brokerage could be the first to take the plunge and get rid of them.

The writer is a former investment banker and a senior research adviser at Frontline Analysts, a provider of equity research

干我们这一行的人——研究分析师或者股票经纪人——都提出过我们自己再也不愿提起的建议。在最糟糕的时刻，它们在谈话中冒了出来。这个时候，你通常是坐在梅费尔区(Mayfair)的某个办公室里，向一位拥有几百万身家的对冲基金经理解释，他的投资究竟哪里出了错。你把话题扯得太远，或者表现得有点自满，惹恼了他，于是他打断你的思路，像毒蛇一样阴森森地问道：“关于你推荐买入Amalgamated Widgets的事呢？”

你知道Amalgamated这个季度以来已经下跌了16%；你能做的只有拖延。在你等着这阵子难堪过去的时候，你还幻想着要不说实话算了。

这可能不是一个单纯的错误。你也许为了讨好某个人而做出买入建议。因为说老板的大客户坏话而树敌的人是得不到升迁的。位高权重的人可以从各个方面帮助你。据说，花旗集团(Citigroup)旗下所罗门美邦(Salomon Smith Barney)的电信业分析师杰克?格鲁曼(Jack Grubman)曾经提高一项评级以迎合该行的首席执行官，他希望这位老总可以帮忙让自己的孩子进入一所贵族幼儿园。（桑迪?威尔否认存在任何不当行为。）

格鲁曼被终身禁止从事证券业工作，但拍马屁还可能在没有明显越界的情况下使你做出不正确的判断。或许Amalgamated的老板将在你组织的某个会议上发表主旨演讲。当你发出邀请时，你觉得买入建议没问题，但那是在该公司发布两次盈利预警之前。

随后就是忽视。你本应在两个月前就调低Amalgamated的评级——你知道这一点，但正好赶上了财报季，管理层不在的日子，连续数周都在忙一宗永远不会成功的首次发行上市(IPO)。

当你终于有时间处理这件事的时候，你不得不面对整个行业都一团糟的局面。Amalgamated的所有竞争对手都同样糟糕甚至更为严重。但你的老板要求过，所有建议都必须基于行业相关的基础之上；这些制造商中必须有一家被评为“买入”。或许还不只一家：基金经理不希望和分析师谈论他们的“持有”建议。

与客户驱动的买入建议不同，屈从于此类压力至少是你自己愚蠢的错误。和你谈话的那个家伙知道得很清楚，Amalgamated是你的客户名单中最大的对冲基金持仓最多的公司。负责该头寸的基金经理为人傲慢，听不进不同意见。所有人都建议买入Amalgamated，因为没有人希望收到潮水般的抗议电邮——这将是下调评级的后果。分析师们和其他所有基金经理在酒吧里碰头，讨论他们对Amalgamated的真实想法。而他们往往也会坦言自己对其最大持仓者的看法。

倒霉的股票分析师对尴尬并不陌生，即便在他的建议真实不掺假的情况下。或许当你提议买入Amalgamated的时候，从逻辑上、从财务上来说都非常合理——业务发展稳健，一个明显会提升估值的因素就在眼前。然而，出于你不理解的某些原因，这种分析并未奏效。如果你在管理资金，你会立即止损（或者被你的风险经理逼着止损）。但你没有管理资金。下调一只不断下跌的股票——不久前你刚刚上调了它的评级——是很尴尬的。因此你坚持买入评级，数次下调目标价，希望没有人注意到这些，然而这是徒劳的。所有的买入建议，大概有一半都有着诸如此类的故事。因此明智的基金经理不会关注研究简报角落里的“买入/卖出/持有”建议，除非作为谈话的开场白或者对过分自大的经纪人的惩戒。

但这些东西仍被发表，仍有大量经验不多的投资者把标题当回事。随着自动“抓屏工具”的发展，已发布的建议所发生的变化，很可能会和旧时一样重要。如果在投资者受到伤害后，监管机构会找上门，“没有人把这种东西当回事”的观点将是站不住脚的。

含有“买入/卖出/持有”字眼的标题受到严厉的监管，基本上却没有多大价值。或许会有勇敢无畏的股票经纪人带头冒险尝试，废除这些建议。

本文作者曾是一位投资银行家，目前在股票研究机构Frontline Analysts任高级研究顾问

译者/邹策