Some day I’ll post about my own brush with (Henry) Blodget, but for now I’ll just clip the entertaining bits from a Business Week piece on Henry’s new market research firm, Cherry Hill Research.
As part of his SEC settlement Henry wasn’t supposed to go within flogging distance of the brokerage industry, and so some are already saying that his apparent plan to write non-stock-picking pieces about public companies comes too close to that line for comfort. Then again, there are cynics like me who say that’s nothing new — even in his most cited opinions as a Merrill analyst Blodget filled his equity research prose with enough qualifiers that it is debatable whether he was picking stocks even back then.
Judging by the “important disclosure” notes at the end of the research paper, it appears Blodget isn’t taking his predictions too seriously this time: “We can guarantee that our opinions, conclusions, and predictions will sometimes be wrong…. Sometimes [errors] will result from mistakes, ignorance, and/or idiocy.”
Later on, in a section almost certainly inspired by the embarrassing e-mails he wrote that investigators uncovered and used against him: “We may express initial reactions to information or events and then conclude that these reactions were wrong. We may exaggerate, blow off steam, be sarcastic, or otherwise apply lower standards of accuracy and professionalism in casual communications than in publications. Such utterances may be or seem inconsistent with our professional opinions.”
Finally, after disclosing his ownership of 3,600 shares of Yahoo! (YHOO ), 1,000 shares of Amazon (AMZN ), and 1,800 shares of Time Warner (TWX ), he makes clear that he’s not trying — nor legally able — to offer investment advice. Still, he warns, “we prefer that the prices of stocks we own go up, not down, so you might conclude that our opinions are skewed by self-interest, hopes, dreams, and/or ‘rooting bias.’”
Related posts: