- The Finance Gourmet

Goldman Sachs Report Card Accountability

November 19, 2013 by Finance Gourmet

There is precious little accountability in the world of stock market analysis. I’ve written before about how Goldman Sachs’ chief market analyst (at the time) predicted an up year for stocks during every single year from before the internet bubble burst through to when she finally stopped making market predictions after again predicting a higher stock market for 2008. If you’re recent market history is a bit fuzzy, 2008 was a disastrous year for stocks and the start of the so-called Great Recession. Even where there appears to be accountability, it is often easily gamed. Analysts get rankings from various financial groups, but those are often laughable. If an analyst has a “Buy” on a stock and that company reports after-hours that its main product slaughters babies by the thousands, when the analyst cuts his outlook before the market opens, he gets credit for shifting his prediction before the ensuing drop in the stock price. So, it was a little breath of fresh air, when MarketWatch decided to take a quick look at the report card for Goldman Sachs’ 2013 investment recommendations. Goldman Sachs 2013 Investment Calls Report Card Remember in elementary school when the teacher had you self-grade some papers. You …

Abby Joseph Cohen Track Record Accurate As A Broken Indicator Light

November 18, 2020August 9, 2009 by Finance Gourmet

I fired off a quick post yesterday about the “news” that Goldman Sach’s Abby Joseph Cohen declared the recession over. If you missed it, I made the point that an arrow pointing up painted on a wall had just as accurate of a track record as Ms. Cohen did over the past decade or so. For some reason, Cohen has a set of groupies, or fan boys, or whatever that always like to remind people of when she was “right” and, of course, always forget about when she was wrong. The truth is that Abby Joseph Cohen has never been “right”. If your answer to a yes/no question is always the same, you aren’t getting the questions right. You are just happening upon the questions that were written with a yes answer. That isn’t intelligence or ability, that’s statistics. Still, so as to avoid anyone showing up and (publicly, so far, it’s only messages) saying that I have forgotten about all the really great “calls” she has made, I offer the following factual data as proof that any upward pointing arrow would have made, and lost, investors just as much money as Abby Joseph Cohen over the last 10 years. …