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Is Wall Street Research not what it used to be?

The name Wall Street stands for high finance at the global power centre New York, for the top of the top of financial services, for cr?me de la cr?me of financial talent and for the best of the best of market analysis. But after big Wall Street Banks only narrowly escaped prosecution for publishing biased research to win more banking business, this confidence took a deep plunge. Paying a total of $1.4 billion to drop charges, Wall Street firms faced difficulties to retain and hire first-class analytical talent.

At the Reuters Investment Summit in New York, Tom Brown, manager of the $550 million Second Curve Capital fund, criticized the poor quality of research conducted at Wall Street investment banks. He claims it`s an issue of money: good analysts are simply paid better at other institutions, like hedge funds and financial managers. This is not a new trend and even Mr. Brown himself admitted to have been wooed by a hedge fund in his analyst days.

Now he fears that Wall Street firms are moving to slow to stop the migration of research talent, and are thus compromising the quality of their services. In the reality of a global financial market, with business hubs like London eager to take first place, this could prove fatal to the prestigious Wall Street. In his words: "If Wall Street will have too many young and inexperienced analysts, they will neither have the knowledge nor the experience to provide the research investors need."