>>Henry Blodget (born 1966) is an American former equity research analyst, currently banned from the securities industry, who was senior Internet analyst for CIBC Oppenheimer during the dot-com bubble and the head of the global Internet research team at Merrill Lynch. Blodget is now the editor and CEO of The Business Insider, a business news and analysis site, and a host of Yahoo Daily Ticker, a finance show on Yahoo.
>>Blodget received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale University and began his career as a freelance journalist and was a proofreader for Harper's Magazine. In 1994, Blodget joined the corporate finance training program at Prudential Securities, and, two years later, moved to Oppenheimer & Co. in equity research. In October 1998, he predicted that Amazon.com's stock price would hit a pre-split price of $400 (which it did a month later, gaining 128%).
>>This call received significant media attention, and, two months later, he accepted a position at Merrill Lynch. In early 2000, days before the dot-com bubble burst, Blodget personally invested $700,000 in tech stocks, only to lose most of it in the years that followed. In 2001, he accepted a buyout offer from Merrill Lynch and left the firm.
>>In 2002, then New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, published Merrill Lynch e-mails in which Blodget gave assessments about stocks which conflicted with what was publicly published. In 2003, he was charged with civil securities fraud by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. He agreed to a permanent ban from the securities industry and paid a $2 million fine plus a $2 million disgorgement."
This is what made me spit out my drink at the top of page 2
But that crash was a product of investors’ and analysts’ overexuberance (sorry!),
not evidence of a fundamental flaw in the tech industry’s start-up ecosystem.
Woah that guy replied to one of my tweets a few weeks ago and I had no idea who he was. Apparently that was a pretty awesome tweet reply, was wondering why my followers went up.
You should read this guy's story. Read his settlement. You might observe that the companies he was reporting on were far more deceptive than he was. He was but a pawn in their game. You might even conclude he was more or less the fall guy for some of the fraudulent individuals running those companies, who, if I'm not mistaken are still active in the industry and probably still taking on investments. Or you might not. It's worth reading anyways, as we make our way through another bubble.
I would also question the rest of the analysis as well.