At The Motley Fool, we poke plenty of fun at Wall Street
analysts and their endless cycle of upgrades, downgrades, and
"initiating coverage at neutral." So you might think we'd be
the last people to give virtual ink to such "news." And we
would be -- if that were all we were doing.
But in "This Just In," we don't simply tell you what the
analysts said. We'll also show you whether they know what
they're talking about. To help, we've enlisted
Motley Fool CAPS, our tool for rating stocks and analysts
alike. With CAPS, we track the long-term performance of Wall
Street's best and brightest -- and its worst and sorriest,
too.
And speaking of the best ...
Industrial heavyweight
Caterpillar (NYSE: CAT) set Wall Street
purring with its
earnings reportyesterday -- but not everyone's
convinced.
Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) upgraded the shares
and upped its earnings guesses for the company, saying Cat's
results portend: "a sharper construction recovery and CAT's
cost control has clearly improved, benefiting from aggressive
1Q actions." Yet somehow, rival analyst
Stifel Nicolauslooked at the same numbers that Goldman
crunched, and came to the opposite conclusion: Cat is a dog.
You should sell it.
So who's the savvier equity-veterinarian in this
debate?
Let's go to the tape
As I've mentioned several times in the past, Goldman's
a puzzler -- and famously disdainful of backseat drivers. The
megabanker moved quickly to pay back a government loan (that
it never wantedin the first place) earlier this year. In
a similar vein, Goldman quickly found that publishing its
stock ratings via Briefing.com subjected it to
unwanted accountabilityfor its opinions. So while the odd
rating (such as Caterpillar) will occasionally slip out in
the mainstream press, Goldman hasn't
published its ratingsas a matter of course since
2007.
Not so with Stifel, which assiduously posts its opinions
on Briefing.com -- and for good reason. Three years of
tracking this analyst's performance on Motley Fool CAPS has
proven that when it comes to picking winning stocks, Stifel
is one of the
best in the business.
Famed for its successful (and long-term) picks in the
energy sector -- the firm's October 2007 recommendation of
Massey Energy (NYSE: MEE) has gained 41%,
while its 2006 endorsement of
National Oilwell Varco (NYSE: NOV) has nearly
doubled the market's returns -- Stifel's also no slouch when
it comes to the companies whose products do much of the work
getting coal and oil sands out of the ground, and into your
gas tank:
Stock
Stifel Says:
CAPS says:
Stifel's Picks Beating S&P By:
Joy Global (Nasdaq: JOYG)
Outperform
****
24 points
Deere (NYSE: DE)
Outperform
*****
17 points (two picks) Continued... |