Stockwatch: Trench warfare
This article was originally published in Scrip
Executive Summary
As Europeans marked 70 years since the end of the war in Europe last weekend, conflict of a different sort was being waged between investors and investment bank analysts. Writers on behavioral finance typically think of conflict in the context of investors buying and selling the same stock. However, at times last week a much more malevolent force was working, one reminiscent of the way incompetent and distant general staff in the Great War ordered soldiers to their certain death from a fusillade of machine fire in the brutal European battlefields as they dressed for a regimental dinner many miles away.