The Loneliest Analyst

By ANDREW MARTIN and LOUISE STORY
NYT

BankAtlantic accused Richard Bove, a bank analyst, of defamation after he wrote a critical report. He received little support from his peers in the industry before the suit was settled.

Lutz, Fla.

RICHARD X. BOVE is a bank analyst who likes to take what he calls “extreme positions.” He occasionally moves the stock market, which has earned him a certain amount of prestige and notoriety — but has also gotten him fired several times.

One recent Tuesday morning, for instance, Mr. Bove opined from his bright-orange home office, in this town just north of Tampa, that new government rules would curb mortgage profits and, therefore, bank profits, too.

It wasn’t a particularly extreme pronouncement, by Bove standards. Yet shares of Wells Fargo, the nation’s largest mortgage lender, started to drop, and his phone lighted up.

“That’s what makes the game fun, right?” he says.

(More here.)