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Strategies & Market Trends : Stock Attack II - A Complete Analysis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: donald sew who wrote (2514)	3/11/2001 11:32:56 AM
From: Trading Machine	Respond to of 52237

Yes Don I agree that there are ethical questions here, and they abound throughout the industry. For example a couple of years ago Datek let its CFO leave because the SEC said that Datek was using investor funds for housekeeping. If you and I did this, we would be in jail right now. I am a novice in this industry, but in the short time I have been trading I have seen many abuses of the system ranging from the AJC factor to pump and dump to front running and so on. Recently a good friend of mine living in coastal Delaware in a small town told me that his wife had bought some YAHOO during the top of the craze last year and the broker just recommended that she sell it and buy some MSFT. I have dealt with bureaucrats all my working life and from what I see in the stock market is that many people have a license to steal and do! The only way I can see to help combat this is for people like yourself that are widely read to continue to point out the disparities between the real and unreal. I feel sorry for the people that George W. would allow to invest a portion of their own social security funds in the stock market. If you think speculation was rampant last year.... just think about all those sheep getting shorn!!! The folks at GS, MWD, Dean Wittier etc. must loose a lot of sleep each night licking their chops! I wonder which of the big houses will invest enough in payola to sway the bureaucrats to force the folks to channel their social security "investments" through a certain firm or investment vehicle? ggg BWDIK One mans opinion, I respect others. ggg Paul Kellam

To: donald sew who wrote (2514)	3/11/2001 4:48:58 PM
From: Casaubon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 52237

or just put a minimum time period in holding any stock, the way euro options are traded! The SEC could cut down on speculation if they wanted to.

To: donald sew who wrote (2514)	3/12/2001 12:22:39 AM
From: Lee Lichterman III	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 52237

>>>> Where the heck is accountability in this system <<<< A DELUGE of lawsuits is about to hit some of Wall Street's top analysts. Irate investors are blaming pundits' bullish reports on companies for helping to create a stock-market bubble and losing them billions of dollars when the market crashed last year. A $10m (£6.8m) complaint made last week by a New York doctor against Henry Blodget, Merrill Lynch's top internet analyst, says stock analysts engage in "systematic fraud . . . on an industry-wide basis". Jacob Zamansky, the doctor's attorney, says Blodget recommended investors to buy stock in companies without revealing that Merrill Lynch was earning money as a financial adviser to these companies or to companies that they were about to acquire. The banker blames Blodget, 35, and his firm for losing him hundreds of thousands of dollars on an investment in InfoSpace, an online directory. The stock has plunged 96% since he bought it. Another of Blodget's fateful buy recommendations was ICG, an internet incubator, which has fallen by more than 90%. "We are preparing a blueprint for other cases against analysts," says Zamansky. "I have been approached by a number of investors." He says he is taking a "careful look" at Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley and Jack Grubman of Salomon Smith Barney. Grubman, a veteran telecommunications analyst, tarnished his reputation in 1999 when he suddenly recommended that his clients buy AT&T, a company he had previously advised them to avoid because of its risky $100 billion cable-buying spree. Salomon immediately secured a lucrative underwriting deal from AT&T. But AT&T's stock has fallen 50% since then. Grubman belatedly removed his buy recommendation. "Everyone on the Street assumed he had been pressured to upgrade the stock to secure AT&T's business," says another telecoms analyst. Last year Grubman was slow to downgrade the 11 competitive local-exchange carriers that he covers. He started to advise investors to exercise caution only after the stocks had already lost 77% of their value. Meeker, dubbed Queen of the Internet by Barron's, the financial magazine, has also been accused of ramping her stock recommendations to help her firm win business. She even played a role in persuading Time Warner to merge with America Online and has been the "ra-ra girl" for a long list of flotations by Morgan Stanley, including Priceline.com. Like Blodget, Meeker has never put a sell rating on any company. At the end of last year she rated all 11 net stocks that she follows "outperform", even though they had fallen an average 83%. Arthur Levitt, outgoing chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, warned last year: "The competition for investment-banking business is so keen that analysts' sell recommendations on stocks of banking clients or potential banking clients are very rare. Whether this is an actual or perceived conflict, clearly in the minds of many institutional buyers, brokerage-firm analysis has diminished credibility." As Nasdaq stocks soared into the stratosphere during the late 1990s, Wall Street analysts invented ever more fanciful ways of valuing these companies and justifying one-year target prices that were 50% or 100% higher than those they had already reached. Value investors such as Warren Buffett were horrified and warned of impending disaster. Blodget and Meeker received salaries of $15m a year for their work. Grubman got $20m. Blodget rose to fame in December 1998 when, as an obscure net analyst at CIBC Oppenheimer, he predicted that Amazon.com, then trading at $240, would rise to $400. It did within three weeks, although most analysts had scoffed at his prediction. Blodget was quickly hired by Merrill for $4m and made a succession of seemingly successful calls. But all those stocks have since collapsed, including Amazon. Merrill says: "Almost all Henry Blodget's internet recommendations carried our highest risk rating. He warned two years ago that 75% of all internet stocks would fail." sunday-times.co.uk