Internet killed the Wall Street star
The internet is being touted as the victory of the little guy over a financial-industrial conspiracy. The little guy in question is the small investor who can access web sites that give better corporate earnings estimates than Wall Street analysts.
The losers will be big corporations that use investment-banking analysts to manipulate public opinion. They spread around expected earnings figures that are way below reality so the press will later write "results exceeded expectations". Anyone using the original information to invest would be sure of getting things wrong.
That at least is how Michael Lewis, famed author of Liar's Poker, sees it and he uses typically colourful language to make his point. "Of course the behaviour of the Wall Street analysts is corrupt," he says in a recent article for Bloomberg News, sounding the death knell for an entire profession at the stroke of a pen. "The companies they are meant to be 'analyzing' are almost always either customers, or potential customers, of their investment-banking divisions.