本内容来自:首页

全美研究团队-分析师的演变

为了庆祝全美研究团队成立40周年,我们来看看一群善于计算的人是如何成为金融界最有权势和影响力的团体的。

Richard Jenrette在1929年出生前六个月出生,意识到股市在20世纪50年代后期的餐饮中创立了一家精品投资银行时,股市正在发生地震转变。以一种新型的机构投资者。亚博赞助欧冠他们在处理这种变化的一部分的战略是相当简单的:委员会是固定的,所以它可以购买一百万个股票的目标机构,而不是经过有兴趣购买的个人。他们还注意到,投资者通过购买他们所知道的公司来测试股票市场水域,并仍将其投资组合分配给债券。他们的公司,Donaldson,Lufkin&Jenrette开始推出研究报告吹嘘从旧的蓝筹筹码和有前途的增长股。“我们的报告相当长,”Jenrette说。“如果你打算在这些小公司中购买库存,你需要更多地了解它,而不是,你可以快速进出。”源自精明的销售工具 - 综合性股权研究报告 - 几乎将一堆后台编号 - 克里切斯转变为十年后成为华尔街的最强大而有影响力的群体之一:股权分析师。亚博赞助欧冠机构投资者将在1972年开始排名第一分析师,其目前着名的全美研究团队,但Jenrette维护了DLJ,这十年早些时候曾经疯狂的墙街明星。“分析师曾经是一种绿色眼影统计学家,”他说。 “We invented the analyst-salesman, where the analyst was turned loose.” The logic of the DLJ approach became clear to many other firms, as did the outsize profits the young firm was raking in. Researchers not only helped build share within the market; they seemed to increase the size of it. Analysts’ reports and recommendations worked like advertising, piquing the interest of investors when there was no other news to be talked up. In this way, analysts begat more analysts. “The firms had to use them because there was more competition for customers,” says Charles Geisst, author of Wall Street, A History. This rapid-fire transformation of the research industry was a long time in coming. Financial historians describe the decades between the ’29 crash and the mid-1950s as giving rise to Wall Street’s “lost generation.” A young man who would have chosen a career in investment banking instead went elsewhere. It was only in the late ’50s, when Donaldson, Lufkin and Jenrette were graduating from business school, that the promise of a postwar bull market lured the best and brightest back to Wall Street. By that time, old-line underwriters, who landed deals largely as a result of personal relationships forged in the exclusive clubs of Boston, New York and Philadelphia, were being challenged by a new crop of ambitious firms eager to win their own lucrative underwriting gigs. Wall Street’s new meritocracy — DLJ among them — reasoned that the best way to distinguish their talents was through their equity research departments. The merger boom that began in the late ’50s continued over much of the next decade as conglomerates became a popular way for companies to insulate themselves from various levels of risk. According to Geisst, even General Motors, a longtime Morgan Stanley client, began to use other investment banks to underwrite its new issues. The preponderance of large corporations shopping around for investment banking services placed even more importance on the role of the equity analyst. Banks could use their research departments as a way to curry favor with potential clients, with the veiled promise that the banks’ analysts would provide upbeat reports on the clients when it came time to attract new infusions of institutional money. Analysts understood their sectors and had all the industry contacts. But beyond that, their participation as part of a bank’s underwriting team impressed potential clients and carried an implicit promise of favorable coverage in the future. At first, the big investment banks didn’t follow DLJ’s enthusiastic lead; they viewed research as something of a necessary evil. In his 2008 book, The Partnership: The Making of Goldman Sachs, author (and Greenwich Associates founder) Charles Ellis says that longtime Goldman, Sachs & Co. chairman John Whitehead had mixed feelings about spending $6 million a year on the function in the 1970s. But by the 1980s the bulge bracket dominated II’s rankings and the banks’ research budgets could run into the hundreds of millions of dollars a year, subsidized in large part by the underwriting side. Moreover, if the banks wanted to be in the business of making lucrative block trades, they had to match the boutiques’ and brokerages’ research teams, because for institutional investors analysts represented not just an important tool in the drive for higher returns but something of an insurance policy. Legal precedent such as the prudent-man rule (which stemmed from an 1830 Massachusetts court decision) as well as subsequent legislation absolved fiduciaries of blame for individual bad investments provided the portfolio as a whole was responsibly invested. For a pension fund overseen by a board with little experience or specialized knowledge that was suddenly convinced that equities had to be part of the plan, the imprimatur of an expert researcher, supported by reams of paper, held considerable importance. “They would take the sell-side research somewhat seriously and keep it on hand,” Geisst says of fund managers. In the early 1960s automobile manufacturer Studebaker Corp. went belly-up, overwhelmed by pension obligations and declining market share. When the automaker defaulted on its pension obligations, the United Auto Workers union was left holding the bag. The UAW wanted the federal government to take responsibility for the pensions; the default triggered years of political wrangling that resulted in ERISA, which created, among other things, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. Uncle Sam agreed to insure private pensions; in return, he set strict standards for institutional money managers. ERISA also included mechanisms for IRAs and 401(k) and 403(b) defined contribution plans. In the 1950s and ’60s, pension funds and other institutional money managers did not see themselves as investment advisers. Many of them were employees of their company or members of its board of directors — people with no financial experience who did not want to be held personally liable for bad investment decisions. Their fear proved well founded. A study by A.G. Becker & Co. in 1968 showed that most institutional money managers didn’t know their assets from their elbows. They consistently underperformed the broad market, thus running afoul of the prudent-man rule. DLJ exploited this opportunity by marketing its research to fund managers — for a fee, of course. (Ironically, DLJ never won the All-America Research Team.) The pension fund manager didn’t have to personally vet each investment; he or she could rely on a Wall Street researcher. For all that, technology placed enormous limitations on the quality and quantity of information that an analyst could produce. Texas Instruments introduced the first handheld calculator in 1969, and analysts were among the earliest adopters, but John Mackin, a 24-time All-America Research Team member who in 1967 began a  32-year Wall Street career covering Machinery at Burnham & Co., remembers several years of working with a slide rule. Charting even the most basic metrics — growth or earnings history, for example — involved visiting a library to examine Moody’s annuals, which provided data for all public companies, then having an assistant copy out relevant passages line by line because photocopiers were not yet widespread. “Gathering the kind of information you can get in five minutes today might have taken a month,” says Mackin. Given the commissions they were paying, institutional investors looked upon free sell-side research as their due. Indeed, as the stock market continued its tear through the 1960s, more and more institutional investors wanted in. Separate studies in 1965 and 1968 showed that both mutual funds and institutional funds were unable to beat the overall market; one inference was that they needed more stock-picking help. Although not a precise analogue, the number of Chartered Financial Analysts increased to 3,219 in 1972 from 268 in 1960 and would roughly double every decade hence. And the pay was more than respectable. In 1971, when the average house was worth $25,000 and a new car cost $2,000, a junior Wall Street analyst started at $15,000 and rose to $25,000 to $50,000 at midcareer, with six-figure salaries for a few.

1975年5月1日,美国证券交易委员会(Securities and Exchange Commission,简称sec)下令终止固定佣金制度,立即向嘉信理财(Charles Schwab)等折价券商开放了这项业务,并大幅压低了整个行业的交易成本;这引发了广泛的整合,并导致多家券商倒闭。Jenrette说:“分析师仍然很受欢迎,但是支付他们的收入已经不存在了。”“过去的机构经纪业务在60年代是一座金矿,到了70年代就变成了一座地雷。”

随后的SEC立法将研究作为“安全港”,确保其成本可以合法地包含在交易的价格中(与Dodgier“软美元”等额外,如IPO拨款和营销偏袒等)。Jenrette推出了当SEC授权谈判委员会时,它的手可能被1969年发布的招股说明书DLJ被迫成为第一个公开的重要沃尔街公司的途径。DLJ在50%的范围内运行利润率的启示戏剧化了35美分的利润丰厚的固定佣金,可以在购买方面激起相当大的激动。有些讽刺的是,20世纪70年代熊市和五月日改革的组合意味着该公司从未能够作为公共公司提供可比的回报。即使投资银行继续进入研究,它也不是练习或资本市场的增长期。1978年,当雷曼兄弟和库恩,Loeb&Co有限公司合并时,他们的总资本仅为7800万美元。在一个以悲观和混乱主导的环境中,萨罗顿兄弟亨利考夫曼等债券分析师突出了股权同行,随着十年后的滞留加剧,各种类型的市场达到了低位的退潮。美国经济同样,在1980年下半年再次陷入衰退。共同基金行业,一贯管理近一半的爱尔拉国联资产,促进了本期间内部研究分析师的崛起。研究重点是纯洁,几乎没有必要支持销售或投资银行职能。还有另一个重要原因,当来自投资银行的分析师遇到越过共同基金时,该职位比研究员更容易成为投资组合经理。 As Jenrette says, “The pay was better.” A direct hit to analysts came from the junk bond scandal that felled Michael Milken and Drexel Burnham Lambert, which in 1989, while already embattled, placed 38 members on the All-America Research Team, the fourth-highest number, after leading all others in 1988. For analysts the end of the 1980s marked a period of considerable movement, as departing Drexelites and others sought safe haven, and not always as researchers. Ever since the 1960s the field had been viewed as a direct path to portfolio management, and in its 1990 edition II reported that at least a half dozen members of the 1989 team had left to manage money. But another bull market was beginning for equities, and capital markets became sexy and interesting again. In 1995, CNBC began reporting directly from the New York Stock Exchange floor. In August of that year, II All-American Mary Meeker served as analyst as Morgan Stanley led the IPO for Netscape Communications Corp.; a few months later, with Chris DuPuy, she wrote The Internet Report, which became a bestselling book. Early that year the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index began a phenomenal rise that would take it from 800 to more than 5,000 in just five years. The Internet bubble marked the pinnacle of research analysis, the true rock-star years. Celebrity analysts retained their own press agents, and brokerages installed television studios in their offices. Dan Reingold was a well-known telecommunications analyst who chronicled how equity researchers became household names during the Internet bubble in his tell-all book, Confessions of a Wall Street Analyst. He recalls attending a dinner in the late ’90s at which he asked Henry Blodget, Merrill Lynch & Co.’s star Internet analyst, to introduce AOL chief executive Steve Case to the crowd. Blodget jumped at the chance, telling Reingold that he would be introducing someone he’d never met. “Hmmm, I thought to myself,” said Reingold. “This guy covers AOL and, on behalf of Merrill Lynch, recommends its stock to thousands of individuals and institutions around the world. How can he publish research reports on a company without having met the driving force behind it? Geez, I bet sixth graders feel they know Steve Case better than Henry Blodget does.” Then there was Reingold’s first run-in with Jack Grubman, the Salomon Brothers analyst who would become his archrival, when he was still working in investor relations for MCI and Grubman had just written a negative report on the telecom giant. Reingold contacted Grubman to counter his damning report point by point. Yet Grubman didn’t even attempt to debate Reingold and casually told him he’d verified the information he used by running it past a buddy at  AT&T. “Now I’m a pretty calm guy, but I almost lost it when I heard that,” Reingold wrote in his 2006 book. “[Grubman] had relied on someone who worked for AT&T, a competitor that would do almost anything to discredit our long distance service. Was this how  Wall Street research was done, by relying on biased sources and unchecked assumptions? What offended me the most was the notion that Jack Grubman was more interested in making a splash than in really understanding what he was writing about.” The splashy rock-star years didn’t last long. The first blow to the research industry was the SEC’s Regulation Fair Disclosure, enacted on August 15, 2001, prohibiting disclosure of material information to select people — including securities analysts. “Prior to Reg FD companies would be much looser about their thoughts about what might happen,” says longtime DLJ analyst Dennis Leibowitz, who during his nearly 40-year career on Wall Street was ranked No. 1 in Broadcasting, Cellular, Communications or Lodging 25 times. “Even if they didn’t give forecasts, they would be much more open about where they saw things going, and they would be willing to say more without worrying that they had to put out a press release or tell the world. Companies didn’t think so much that what they were saying was subject to oversight by regulatory authorities, because it wasn’t.” Surveys of institutional investors, including II’s own poll during the compilation of its annual research rankings, indicated minimal dissatisfaction on the part of investors. Many analysts, on the other hand, felt otherwise, especially because compensation was also taking a hit during the period. Christopher Dixon, who left UBS in 2003 to manage private equity investments at Gabelli Group Capital Partners, was among the exodus of senior analysts. Both analysts and markets suffered when it became more difficult to ask sophisticated questions in a timely manner, he says. “How are you optimizing capital structure, and what are you doing with cost of capital, and are you issuing debt or buying back stock? These are questions that you probably couldn’t ask except as part of a conference call,” Dixon says. For analysts at investment banks, there was worse to come in the form of the global settlement reached in April 2003 under which ten firms paid $1.4 billion in fines and agreed to a series of reforms meant to eliminate conflicts of interest between investment banking and research departments. In preventing analysts from communicating with underwriting teams or sharing in banking revenues, the settlement left the funding of research departments wholly dependent on trading commissions — at a time when commissions were rapidly shrinking because of cheaper electronic trading. The financial crisis that peaked in 2008 began because of a liquidity shortfall primarily caused by overinvestment in the U.S. real estate market. Matters accelerated as a trickling stream of bank failures that began with subprime lender Countrywide Financial Corp. swelled into a raging flood that carried away some of the biggest names on Wall Street, including Bear Stearns Cos. (taken over by JPMorgan Chase & Co.) and Lehman Brothers Holdings (part of which was snatched up by Barclays). As a result, according to a managing director at a Wall Street brokerage who wishes to remain anonymous, the link between investment banking revenue and research has been weakened. But he says there are still companies out there that view research as very important when considering which bank they will use for underwriting, and his firm, which has almost no research component, is losing business to brokerages that offer more. And fundamentals still count for something too. High frequency traders deal in hundreds of shares in hundredths of a second, which isn’t going to move prices, the Wall Street executive says. By contrast, if a mutual fund, pension fund or hedge fund buys something, they’re making a judgment about valuation, and it’s going to affect valuation, he says: “The fundamental analyst will always win out in the end.”

理查德·詹雷特(Richard Jenrette)表示,上世纪50年代末后台统计学家使用的那种基本原理正在华尔街复兴。“你瞧,我们又回到了统计数据,”他说。当然,回到半个世纪前的方法的学科往往会发现,第二次的成功之路更加艰难。••