Peridot Capitalist

In recent days I have been paying special attention to shares of Blackberry maker Research in Motion (RIMM). The stock is one that had decent earnings this quarter but some investors wanted more, which prompted a pretty significant sell off in the stock. Despite the market having recently made new yearly highs, RIMM shares have [...]

There are several reasons I typically ignore Wall Street analyst calls. The most compelling is the fact that sell side recommendations over the long term have been shown to underperform the market with above average volatility. Those are lose-lose metrics for investors.
Such poor performance is largely attributable to analysts being backward looking when they make [...]

For those of you who don’t know Merrill Lynch chief economist David Rosenberg, he has been very bearish on the U.S. economy for a long time, long before the recession hit. Some give him credit for predicting how things would play out, while others criticize the fact that he was years early and therefore missed [...]

In recent months it would have been difficult to find a stock that Wall Street analysts were more pessimistic about than struggling smart-phone maker Palm (PALM). According to Thomson/First Call, 23 analysts follow the stock, 10 have sell ratings, and only 2 have buy ratings (the rest were neutral). In a world where brokerage firms [...]

I really thought we would finally see a less negative view on Citigroup (C) from Meredith Whitney a couple weeks back when the stock hit three bucks. Whitney, you may recall, is the Oppenheimer & Co banking analyst who downgraded Citigroup to “underperform” last year when the shares traded for around $40 each. Last month, [...]

I did a television interview yesterday on BNN which discussed the overly optimistic earnings estimates for 2009, which was prompted by my blog post from last Thursday. Here is the video clip:
Enjoy this post? Subscribe to the blog and never miss another one: Subscribe in a reader | Subscribe by email | Subscribe with KindleYou [...]

Remember when Henry Blodget made his $400 call on Amazon stock back in the late 1990’s? He will be known forever for that call more than all the other ones he made combined. Fast forward nearly a decade and Oppenheimer banking analyst Meredith Whitney has achieved similar rock star status. The August 18th issue of [...]

Academic studies have found that Wall Street analyst stock recommendations trail the market and do so with more volatility. As a result, investors who use sell side research should be careful to pay attention to certain data points that analysts have spent hours putting together, but to completely ignore price targets and ratings and instead [...]

One of the themes I have written about on this blog is the worthlessness of most sell side equity research. Most firms use their research departments to push stocks they have underwritten, and most investors understand that and discount their opinions as a result. Prudential (PRU) didn’t believe in that model, and they were right. [...]

I’ll gladly send a complimentary Peridot Capital 2007 Select List to the first person who can explain how this graphic from the Wall Street Journal Online (”When Buying a Stock, Plan Your Goodbye” – 01/14/07) makes sense. Put another way, how can Morningstar analysts justify calculating the fair value of a stock and then recommend [...]