Analysts spend vast amounts of time poring over the detail of balance sheets, most of them irrelevant when it comes to picking stocks. What they need to do instead is focus on five or six pieces of key information and get a feel for management and strategy. That way they could cover many more stocks than they do and banks could cut their research budgets in half.
But consultancy is not always the quickest way to the obvious. Whether AT Kearney has the guts to tell HSBC this plain fact remains to be seen.
