The Capitalist Vanishes

As someone who has never heard of the I/B/E/S database, and only just knows what a “research analyst” is (I think), I’m hoping for some commenters to expand on this. It sounds scandalous. Is it? Does it matter to me? Lazy minds want to know.

I love this story! IBES grades analysts with its database, major financial publications rank analysts using the database, then analysts get raises and bonuses based on their reputation in the press. Then people are surprised when the “changes” in the database are not random?

What’s going on is obvious to anyone who has ever been a TA. It’s called “grade grubbing”, students lobbying for changes to their grade. You can bet that students never lobby the TA to make their grades lower. They are going to lobby to improve their scores, or if they screwed up they might lobby to drop the class without record. Those are exactly the suspicious changes in the database!

This isn’t to say the database is blameless. I think it is a scandal that they don’t have some way of correcting problems analysts raise with the database in an impartial way. The accuracy of the database is their job.

The solution I always adopted when teaching was a policy that says if a student asks for something to be regraded because of a mistake or oversight, everything the student had turned in would be regraded simultaneously. There are still sources of “regrading bias”, but this strategy eliminates the worst ones.

Actually what I am talking about is a database with every analyst’s historical predictions, and a date of when they made them. Their are different versions of the database available, and the more expensive one allows you to search through the data and find the revisions. I don’t believe that you can completely excise your bad picks, elsewise the database would be useless for historical back-testing.

大家好，我是臺灣人，從臺灣一個人搬家來到美國，環境很陌生，感覺很孤單。以前在臺灣幾家知名的徵信社工作過，我是一個優秀的徵信工作者，希望早點找到適合自己的工作。希望通過貴站，認識更多的朋友。