賣方分析師不值得懷念

Sellside analysts may be a dying breed. The Financial Times reported last week that the number of investment bank analysts providing economic forecasts, and stock and bond recommendations, has fallen by a tenth since 2012. There were only about 6,000 analysts working in these jobs at the world’s 12 largest investment banks in 2016, down from 6,600 four years previously.

賣方分析師這種職業或許正走向末路。英國《金融時報》上週報道，提供經濟預測、推薦股票和債券的投行分析師人數自2012年以來減少了十分之一。2016年，世界上12家最大投行只有大約6000名分析師從事這些工作，而4年前有6600名。

Tighter regulation and falling profits have certainly had an impact, though the numbers suggest that reports of the death of sellside analysis have been greatly exaggerated. Yet even if the numbers do continue to decline, there would be little cause for mourning.

監管收緊和利潤下滑肯定產生了影響，儘管這些數字似乎表明，有關賣方分析已死的報告嚴重誇大其詞。然而，就算分析師人數真的持續減少，人們也沒有什麼理由哀悼。

For a start, most analysts’ research is not very good. In 1973 Princeton University professor Burton Malkiel claimed in his book, A Random Walk Down Wall Street, that: “A blindfolded monkey throwing darts at a newspaper’s financial pages could select a portfolio that would do just as well as one carefully selected by experts.” Many of those pages have disappeared, but research suggesting random selection would be as accurate as analysts’ predictions continues to proliferate. In 2013, for example, Nerdwallet, a personal finance website, found that 49 per cent of analysts’ ratings on the top 30 US stocks during the year were incorrect.

首先，大多數分析師的研究並不是很有水平。早在1973年，普林斯頓大學(Princeton University)教授伯頓?馬爾基爾(Burton Malkiel)在他的著作《漫步華爾街》(A Random Walk Down Wall Street)中寫道：“一隻蒙上眼睛朝着報紙金融版面扔飛鏢的猴子選中的投資組合，可能和專家們精心選擇的投資組合表現一樣好。”很多這樣的金融版面已經消失，但是仍不斷有研究顯示，隨機選擇和分析師的預測準確率一樣高。比如，2013年個人理財網站Nerdwallet發現，那一年分析師評價最高的30只美國股票有49%預測錯誤。

There are many reasons analysts get it wrong. Like other people, they tend to believe that the past is a guide to the future. In 2004 an influential academic paper found that analysts from sellside firms generally recommended “glamour” stocks, that is those with positive momentum, high growth and high volume. Unsurprisingly, these also tended to be the most expensive stocks.

分析師出錯的原因很多。就像其他人一樣，他們傾向於相信過去指引着未來。2004年一份有影響力的學術論文發現，賣方公司的分析師一般會推薦“魅力”股，也就是那些勢頭積極、增長高和交易量高的股票。並不令人意外的是，這些股票往往也是最昂貴的。

Analysts do not like to break away from the herd. Being an outlier and wrong is much more painful than being close to what everyone else is predicting and wrong. This discourages originality of thought and means convergence to the consensus is the norm. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the inaccuracy of analysts’ recommendations of whether to buy, hold or sell a stock.

分析師們不喜歡脫離大部隊。脫離衆人卻被證明錯誤，要比緊跟其他每個人的預測卻被證明錯誤痛苦得多。這阻礙了思維原創性，並且意味着向共識靠攏是常態。沒有什麼比分析師對是否購買、持有和賣出一隻股票的建議不準確更能明顯體現這一點了。

Numerous studies have found that analysts routinely overhype the companies they cover, and that “buy” recommendations outnumber “sell” recommendations, even when the market is heading for a meltdown. An analysis in 2015 by Bespoke Investment Group of S&P 500 stock ratings found that, of the 12,122 ratings, just 6.67 per cent carried a sell label. The temptations to be bullish are clear. Access to company management gets more difficult with a sell recommendation, and the relationship is often of primary importance to an analyst’s employer, the bank. And, as a former analyst wrote in the FT, “fund managers do not want to talk to analysts about their hold recommendations”.

許多研究發現，分析師們常常過度炒作自己覆蓋的企業，而且“買入”建議的數量超過“賣出”，甚至當市場正滑向崩盤時也是如此。Bespoke Investment Group在2015年對標普500(S&P 500)股票評級的分析發現，在12122份評級中，只有6.67%帶有“賣出”標籤。看漲的誘惑很明顯。如果建議賣出，接觸公司管理層會變得更加困難，而這種關係對分析師的僱主——銀行——往往是極其重要的。而且，就如一位前分析師在英國《金融時報》所寫的，“基金經理不想與分析師討論後者的‘持有’建議”。

The remark gets to the heart of the problem, which is the unhealthy relationship between the “sellside” and the so-called “buyside”, the fund managers whom the analysts serve.

這句話觸及問題的核心，也就是“賣方”和所謂的“買方”，也就是分析師所服務的基金經理之間的畸形關係。

Jack Grubman, while a telecoms analyst at Citigroup’s Salomon Smith Barney unit, once claimed in an email that he raised a rating to suit the bank’s chief executive, who he hoped would help get his children into an exclusive kindergarten. (Sandy Weill denied wrongdoing and said the facts had been distorted.) Most examples are less egregious. But they still suggest that the interaction between equity and bond analysts and fund managers continues to encourage unhealthy cosiness.

時任花旗集團(Citigroup)旗下所羅門美邦(Salomon Smith Barney)電信業分析師的傑克?格魯曼(Jack Grubman)曾在一封郵件中聲稱，他曾提高一項評級以迎合花旗首席執行官，希望後者可以幫他的孩子進入一所貴族幼兒園。（桑迪?威爾(Sandy Weill)否認存在不當行爲，並稱相關事實遭到扭曲。）大多數例子沒有這麼惡劣。但這些例子仍似乎表明，股票和債券分析師與基金經理之間的互動依然在助長不健康的密切關係。

When I was a fund manager in the City and on Wall Street in the 1990s and early 2000s, it surprised me how much reliance was placed on analysts to do the hard graft of sifting through the accounts and delivering the in-depth knowledge of a company to which we then committed money. I felt then — and still do — that fund managers should do their own number-crunching before investing.

我上世紀90年代和2000年代初在倫敦金融城(City)和華爾街任基金經理時，驚訝於基金經理極度依賴分析師來完成梳理企業賬目和提供有關這家企業的深度知識的艱苦工作，基金經理據此作出投資決定。我當時覺得——現在也依然覺得——基金經理應該在投資前親自搞明白數字。

More distorting was the prevalence of “soft” commission, whereby research was provided to fund managers in return for brokerage business, a profoundly untransparent mechanism behind which a lot of mutual back-scratching took place — rarely in the interest of the ultimate investor.

更扭曲的是“軟性”佣金的盛行，也就是通過爲基金經理提供研究來換取經紀業務，這種極爲不透明的機制背後存在大量相互照顧的行爲——而這些行爲很少是出於最終投資者的利益。

Much has changed since then. For one, the rules on soft commissions have been tightened up considerably. However, stricter regulation has not resulted in analysts getting it right more often. Academics in Texas and Kansas examined the patterns in analyst forecasts made from October 1993 to September 2013, and found that analyst forecast error “significantly increased over the long-term post-regulation period”.

自那以來情況已經發生了很大的變化。至少來說，針對軟性佣金的法規已被大大收緊。然而，更嚴格的監管並沒有提高分析師預測的準確率。德克薩斯州和堪薩斯州的學者查看了1993年10月到2013年9月期間分析師預測的規律，發現分析師預測錯誤的情況“在監管出臺後長期而言顯著增加”。

If greater transparency has not forced analysts to do a better job, other mechanisms must be tried. Alternatively, the demise of sellside research should be quietly celebrated.

如果提升透明度沒能迫使分析師把工作做得更好，就必須嘗試其他機制。或者，人們應該暗自慶幸賣方研究的消亡。