The 'Miss'tery of Analysis

This Post is currently incomplete - I will be working on the same slowly and you might need to wait for 72 hours before the blog is completed..... (72 hours from the time that is shown in your desktop)

As I look back at my life (and others), everything seems to follow a risk-return relationship (one can call it demand-supply or any other blah but that is not the pivot of this post). Well, almost every job…

Why is God is better than Man? He created Women and he created an Equity Analyst. Now compare the two. Surely the former is any day better than the latter unless the former is also a latter. The modernists do argue in favour of women equity analyst saying that two negatives can make a positive. Well, for the fear of my girlfriend, I will agree wholeheartedly to this viewpoint.

Equity Analysts have always befuddled me- they get paid for getting it right but the ‘right’ is not a constraint for pay, promotion or perks. Some of the interesting men I have met in my life are, thankfully, not equity analysts and so I know I can retain my friendship with these men in spite of this post.

To the uninitiated, an equity analyst (kindly understand that I mention only sell side analysts as equity analysts; I call buy side analysts as punters) makes recommendations for buying/selling a stock based on the analyst’s whims and fancies (subtlety disguised as research with a scientific basis). Don’t ask me whose definition of scientific process is used: Galileo’s or Ptolemy’s. Of course, one gets only a minor difference (i.e. from sun to earth) by adopting either scientific process.

When was the last time I saw a stock behave exactly as the analyst predicts? A lot! Though an overwhelming majority of the same happened in computer and Monte Carlo simulations and the rest (a miniscule amount comparable to Dubya’s brains) in reel life.

In reality, the occurrence has been quite dismal. Maybe it is because we don’t have enough women analysts out there.

Life is made more confusing by the disparaging yet standardized comments that these analyst make in the analyst report. So a stock can be ‘Buy, hold, sell’ or ‘ Outperform, market Perform or under perform’ or ‘Strong, neutral, weak’ etc etc. The only thing I have understood from all these is that analyst never performs. To be continued ....