Libel? That is why these bit pieces use amorphous terms w no statistical measurements such as gaining “traction” in “design” Windsor “resurgent” and then other generalities that mean nothing. They very carefully word things that are meaningless and not actionable into phrases that scare.
As such, to get at the truth you need to dig deep into contacts, emails, telephone calls,third party contacts and the line that you can never find and of course Cisco has always maintained a legitimate relationship w Deutsche Bank.
Not difficult to make oneself immune f such a suit if on does not mind being rated as correct barely more than a coin flip. Which this analyst does not.
This guy has gone so far as to have a buy rating on Arista for more than a year before the sell, but yet his price targets have always been lower than Arista’s actual share price st the time.
Now how can you have a buy on a stock, systematically, when the price of the stock has always been higher than your price target? Obvious you cannot…except as cover.
In fact, just two months prior to this guy putting Arista as a sell, this guy actually came out w a new culpa and said he had been wrong about Arista all this time and raised his estimates but w a price target Still lower than the share price and Still called it a buy.
How do you go from that to sell in a matter of a few weeks? Oh yes, Cisco became the “resurgent” Cisco. A mantra he plies as if he was talking about crooked Hillary or little Marco…ie, he is promoting Cisco.
Back in the original internet days,and even naive and I experienced me noticed this, large brokerages would hire very young people (say just out of college) and they would present at investor conferences. Say for Exodus or many others.
They would present verbatim off prepared notes. Then open for questions. Every question asked was answered w the same exact verbatim talking points. NO EXCEPTIONS.
Yeah, companies were outright and unambiguously paying for their stock to be promoted.
I, as someone who never sticks to the note cards. In fact I don’t even use note cards when I speak, was shocked. But there it went and nobody cared or even challenged it. It was all buddy buddy stuff to move stock.
So it is more up to us to protect ourselves than the SEC.
I vividly remember the CEO of a enormous conglomerate who would throw wild parties etc. and who had margined his stock grants to the hilt (9 figure stock grants were too little for this guy). Go on CNBC and do one of their 5 pm interviews and lie his arse off. A few weeks later this enormous conglomerate went bust.
I do believe he ended up in jail eventually but the bank took all his margined stock and the bag holders got zippo. Familiar name, but forget it now. Wasnot Borg Warner but something like that in girth and prominence.
Oh btw my first job out of law school was working for a company composed of persons the SEC had forbidden from running a public company. Instead they got into the quasi I banking industry. And yeah, a lot of us guys were honest and tried to create a real business utterly naive as to who our overlords were.
The company made the front page of the Wall Street Journal btw when the Feds raised them. I resigned a year earlier, the first to figure it out. Moved into the basement of my wife’s parent’s small home (it was still larger than what I grew up in).
I could keep going on. Point is, like in politics, there are some really great and honorable folks and there are those not so much. Yeah, I believe I have a dang good idea for ferreting them out.
I have been impressed by the honesty of so many corporate leaders we follow, and despite this still see the dishonesty in a minority of them.
Tinker
I will have to check in with Arista payroll and see where my money is being funneled from.