Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Classic Wall Street Value Destruction

The dangers of taking Wall Street advice are made clear by this Bloomberg article, titled "Taking Wall Street Advice in Rally Means Owing $6,000". We might re-phrase the title as "Taking Wall Street Advice Causes You to Lose 160% of Your Money In Five Months".

Phenomenal.

Here's a great cut and paste from the article:
Anyone who did what Wall Street analysts advised last March has only losses after the biggest stock market rally in seven decades.

Citigroup Inc., Bank of America Corp. and more than a dozen other firms told clients to purchase European energy producers and U.S. drugmakers while selling banks and retailers, according to combined rankings compiled by Bloomberg. An investor who used $10,000 to buy companies in the highest-rated industries and bet on declines in the lowest since the advance began on March 9 lost everything and would owe as much as $6,000 to cover bearish trades, the data show.

The recommendations didn’t work because companies with the worst earnings led the 46 percent gain in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index since it fell to a 12-year low five months ago. Securities firms that failed to foresee that the hardest-hit stocks last year would recover fastest steered investors to drug and energy producers, which have trailed the MSCI World Index by more than 24 percentage points, the data show.