In 1969, as a junior analyst with Paine Webber Jackson & Curtis, Harold Vogel attended his first due-diligence meeting to review the Walt Disney Co.’s plans for $150 million issuance to help finance an amusement park in the swamplands of central Florida. “And that is how I started following Disney and the entertainment business,” Vogel explains. It turned out to be a winning combination. Five years later he made his first appearance on the All-America Research Team, in third place in Leisure Time. (The sector was renamed Entertainment in 1994.) Vogel appeared every year through 1997, even as he changed firms — first to Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith in 1976 and then to Cowen and Co. in 1994 — ranking 24 times, including ten years in the top spot. In 1984 he published Entertainment Industry Economics: A Guide for Financial Analysis, which quickly became the bible for sector analysts.
Vogel, 65, left the sell side in 1998; since then he has been CEO of Vogel Capital Management.
