New York – As the final quarterly performance article, we review the sorting ability of the research providers covered by the Investars performance measurement service. For the Investars universe of firms, we removed those that have made less than 100 recommendations. The analysis relates to the year ended December 31, 2008.
The goal of this analysis is to assess the stock sorting ability of the research providers. If a firm is good at getting the sock in right recommendation category, the buy portfolio should do better than the sell portfolio, the buy portfolio should do better than the hold portfolio and the hold portfolio should do better than the sell portfolio.
We rank each of these metrics and then add the ranks to make a raw score in the final column. The lower the score the better the firm performed in this assessment.
| Research Provider |
Buy-Sell |
Buy-Hold |
Hold-Sell |
b-s rank |
b-h Rank |
h-s Rank |
total rank |
| B Riley & Co |
65.45 |
1.71 |
63.74 |
1 |
14 |
1 |
16 |
| Rochdale |
9.92 |
4.23 |
5.69 |
5 |
5 |
15 |
25 |
| Haugen Custom Financial Systems, Inc |
9.55 |
5.06 |
4.49 |
8 |
4 |
18 |
30 |
| DA Davidson & Co |
7.84 |
1.05 |
6.79 |
10 |
16 |
11 |
37 |
| Soleil |
9.86 |
6.56 |
3.3 |
6 |
3 |
28 |
37 |
| Ladenburg Thalmann & Co. Inc. |
7.42 |
3.08 |
4.34 |
12 |
8 |
19 |
39 |
| Stifel Nicolaus |
7.02 |
1.85 |
5.17 |
14 |
12 |
16 |
42 |
| Caris & Company |
7.05 |
0.91 |
6.14 |
13 |
18 |
12 |
43 |
| RBC Capital Markets |
7.56 |
4.23 |
3.33 |
11 |
6 |
27 |
44 |
| Hilliard Lyons |
9.78 |
-0.69 |
10.47 |
7 |
39 |
6 |
52 |
| Ford Equity Research |
6.63 |
3.63 |
3 |
15 |
7 |
30 |
52 |
| Audit Integrity, Inc |
10 |
9 |
1 |
4 |
2 |
47 |
53 |
| KeyBanc Capital Markets |
4.85 |
2.03 |
2.82 |
16 |
11 |
31 |
58 |
| Columbine Capital Services, Inc. |
4.72 |
2.2 |
2.52 |
17 |
10 |
33 |
60 |
| Sandler O`Neill |
7.96 |
-1.54 |
9.5 |
9 |
48 |
7 |
64 |
| Standard & Poor`s |
3.97 |
1.74 |
2.23 |
19 |
13 |
35 |
67 |
| Robert W. Baird & Co. |
2.96 |
1.19 |
1.77 |
23 |
15 |
39 |
77 |
| American Tech Research |
10.18 |
-5.83 |
16.01 |
3 |
72 |
4 |
79 |
| UBS |
3.55 |
-0.33 |
3.88 |
21 |
36 |
23 |
80 |
| Raymond James |
4.54 |
-1.55 |
6.09 |
18 |
50 |
13 |
81 |
B. Riley & Co. is at the top of the list in terms of stock sorting ability, meaning that they not only consistently got the stocks in the right bucket, but also maximized the difference between these portfolio returns relative to other providers tracked by the system.
Follow B. Riley were Rochdale, Haugen Custom Financial Systems and DA Davidson.