Keeping Track of Analysts’ Comments

Few people watch the daily frenzy over stock-analyst touts as closely as Cynthia Dietzmann.

Dietzmann, a market researcher at the Web site Briefing.com, each day picks out the hottest analyst recommendations and reports them to the site’s very active traders.

“I get in here somewhere around 4:30 [a.m.],� said Dietzmann, who is based in Jackson Hole, Wyo. “And I am always screamed at by trading floors, ‘You’re late, you’re late. There are so many huge research calls.’ It’s just a frenetic exercise to see what all the research calls are.�

Traders care about analyst comments for a simple reason: There still are good profits to be made from jumping aboard stocks they tout.

The traders, both Wall Street professionals and aggressive individual investors, hope to buy shares in the right stocks before other investors pile in. The bet is that stock brokers and institutional salespeople will create sufficient excitement over analyst recommendations that their clients will buy the shares and push the prices up.

“They know it’s a quick trade,� Dietzmann said. “There’s going to be this trickle effect. They get the call first and it sort of reverberates. Then the Briefing.coms of the world get it, then CNBC picks it up, and each time you’ll get a movement in the stock because it goes out to a wider and wider mass of people.�