There’s nothing like a little midcareer training. Last month Merrill Lynch’s stock research department held a particularly appropriate tutorial: “Managing Investment Downgrades.” It turned out to be Merrill’s best-attended training session this year, filling the meeting room at the firm’s World Financial Center headquarters in lower Manhattan. Were the analysts heeding criticism of their lack of sell recommendations or just preparing for a protracted bear market? Eric Hemel, who heads Merrill’s U.S. equity research effort, stresses that the session on downgrading was not a reaction to investor gripes; the topics for this year’s 12 training sessions were chosen back in November, he says. “There was definitely more interest in this one,” Hemel notes. “Whenever there’s a downgrade, the tendency of all constituencies is to shoot the messenger. This is among the toughest issues an analyst faces in both the best of times and the worst of times.”
