The writer is a former global equity strategist at Citigroup
Let me take you back to September 1989. It was my first day at a long-forgotten UK securities house. The head of equity research asked my father’s profession — a farmer. Perhaps inevitably, I was assigned to the Food Manufacturing team. It was my job to get the coffee, help spread the load on busy results days, prepare stock notes and pore through industry statistics, very much in that order.
My farming background was little help, but I did free up my boss to spend the day calling or meeting investors. It struck me that, for somebody called a research analyst, he didn’t spend much of his time doing research or analysis. Instead, he worked to build and maintain a network across his companies and the investors who owned (or could own) their shares. It was intense work. His main performance measure was the annual Extel survey, which polled institutional investors for their favourite analysts. The most highly ranked were those with the widest and deepest networks, not always those who made the best stock calls. The Institutional Investor magazine survey carried similar significance in the US.