Things are bad, but analysts can’t say ‘sell’

By Robert Powell,
MarketWatch

BOSTON (MarketWatch) — Sometimes you just gotta love Wall Street for calling a spade anything but a spade.

Consider, at a place and time such as this, with the economy teetering on the verge of another recession, none of the 1,485 stocks that make up the S&P 1,500 has a consensus “Sell” rating. And just five, or 0.3%, are ranked as being a “Weak Hold.”

And what’s just as bad is that sell-side analysts seemingly don’t have a strong opinion on what’s worth buying either, according to an analysis just published by Sam Stovall, the chief investment strategist of Standard & Poor’s Equity Research.

Just 79 (or 5%) of the 1485 stocks have consensus “Buy” recommendations, while 1,003 (68%) are ranked “Buy/Hold,” 398 (27%) are ranked “Hold.”

To be fair, Stovall noted that some analysts do have “Sell” recommendations on individual issues — but that’s not enough (from my vantage point) to suggest that Wall Street research analysts should be viewed with anything but skepticism bordering on cynicism.

(More here.)