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KIRK KAZANJIAN<br />
research manager was supposed to be the economist, editor, and team<br />
leader as well. So Stovall collected writings from noted bank economists,<br />
sifted through them, and came up with a summary of what<br />
they thought. It was pretty rudimentary, but it worked.<br />
In no time, Stovall was promoted to industrial analyst, this at a<br />
time when analysts had little visibility or status on Wall Street. “Securities<br />
analysts, as a group, were just starting to organize and it<br />
wasn’t even considered to be a legitimate profession,” Stovall offers.<br />
“I think the first meeting of the New York Society of Security Analysts<br />
was in somebody’s living room in 1939. They were then on hiatus<br />
during World War II. Things didn’t get rolling again until the late<br />
1940s. The Chartered Financial Analyst program wasn’t started until<br />
the early 1960s. I got my CFA as fast as I could in 1965. The CFA<br />
designation and its programs have helped the profession to gain much<br />
more recognition and professionalism.”<br />
THE POLIO REPORT<br />
As a junior analyst for E. F. Hutton in early 1955, Stovall scored<br />
a major coup after learning from a journalist friend that the Food<br />
and Drug Administration was about to approve the first-ever vaccine<br />
against the deadly polio virus. Word was that it had been discovered<br />
by a team led by Jonas Salk, a researcher at the University of Pittsburgh.<br />
The reporter claimed the government was withholding this<br />
announcement until the anniversary of President Franklin Delano<br />
Roosevelt’s death in April 1955. “I decided to write a report on the<br />
drug <strong>com</strong>panies that would likely be licensed to market the Salk polio<br />
vaccine,” Stovall says. “My fellow Wall Street drug analysts either<br />
didn’t know or didn’t care about this discovery. I figured if the government<br />
was going to announce the approval anyway, I would beat<br />
the herd by re<strong>com</strong>mending Merck, Parke-Davis, American Home<br />
Products, and a small California outfit called Cutter Laboratories beforehand.”<br />
When the announcement was made, Stovall’s re<strong>com</strong>mended<br />
stocks went up almost instantly. To the brokers who followed his<br />
advice, Stovall became a hero. “They thought I was a genius,” he exclaims.<br />
“But I was really an opportunistic rookie. I followed this up<br />
by re<strong>com</strong>mending Syntex, the first <strong>com</strong>pany to <strong>com</strong>e out with a birthcontrol<br />
drug.”<br />
These stellar re<strong>com</strong>mendations also helped to further his own career.<br />
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