Word: researchers
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...Many of the firms themselves are already moving away from retail research. Thomas White International, which created a research consortium with four other firms to win settlement dollars, will go back to its main business of managing assets for institutional investors. Ross Smith Energy Group, a Canadian outfit that follows the oil and gas industries, is getting into investment banking. Three companies-Argus, Independent International Investment Research and Pipal Research-have joined with the London Stock Exchange to provide coverage of smaller firms willing to pay for it. Rapid Ratings is finding a hearty new revenue stream in doing analysis...
...handful of investment banks may continue to buy and pass along independent research-either because they know it helps their clients, or because they see it as a marketing tool. By and large, though, the banks never went to great lengths to advertise the availability and value of the research to customers-like, say, Charles Schwab does. That's partly because most customers at firms such as Merrill Lynch deal with intermediaries like brokers. Still, "while the retail investor may not have been accessing that research directly, investment professionals were consuming it and then presenting it to their clients," says...
...banks had a bad habit of issuing overly rosy opinions of companies, particularly the ones the banks were courting for other sorts of business. Twelve companies, including Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, J.P. Morgan Chase and UBS agreed to pay a collective $432.5 million for research to be produced by dozens of independent, outside companies and distributed to the banks' own customers, as a counterweight to their internal opinions. This money, designed to be disbursed over the course of five years, spurred on an industry of independent stock research...
...What will happen to independent stock research? It is an important question to ask, especially at a time when the ethics of financial firms are again front-and-center. Dozens of independent research companies-by some estimates, 60 to 70-have been selling their work to investment banks over the past five years. Under the terms of the settlement, the banks then make that research available to individual investors and the bank employees, like brokers, who advise them. The biggest providers of research to the global settlement are, by most accounts, S&P Equity Research, Morningstar and Argus Research...
...dozens of other firms selling research are much smaller, and have come to depend on the nearly $90 million a year the investment banks have been plowing into the system. When that money stops, "you're going to see a lot of these smaller firms either consolidate or dry up and go away," says James Gellert, CEO of the ratings and research outfit Rapid Ratings International, which sells its research through the settlement...