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KIRK KAZANJIAN<br />
Stovall claims. “The best athlete got to be the quarterback and the<br />
kid whose mother bought the football got to be the captain. In other<br />
words, the sons of the major partners got jobs in management, and<br />
if you were the best analyst, idea generator, and writer you were<br />
named research director. That’s not the case anymore. Nowadays firms<br />
spend millions of dollars on research, and they have several editors<br />
on staff to edit the reports. I used to handle all of these functions<br />
myself. Today’s research director is highly <strong>com</strong>pensated and must be<br />
a good administrator who knows how to recruit and maintain all-star<br />
analysts, while marketing their skills to corporate deal makers.” The<br />
research director’s role became much more prominent and important<br />
once institutional interest in equities ballooned in the 1960s and<br />
1970s. These bigwig clients demanded more detailed and thorough<br />
research from their brokers, and the major firms responded.<br />
PARTNERSHIP AT HUTTON<br />
Stovall was made a partner at E. F. Hutton in 1960. “I thought that<br />
was quite something because there weren’t many big brokerage firms<br />
to begin with, and those that were around were mainly partnerships,”<br />
he says. “Be<strong>com</strong>ing a partner required some capital and was more<br />
difficult than being made a paper vice president, which is the popular<br />
thing today. Now anyone who is a broker or staff specialist of any<br />
substance gets to be a vice president.”<br />
Not one to rest on his laurels, Stovall continued to search for<br />
promising investment opportunities to re<strong>com</strong>mend to his brokers and<br />
clients. “I was trying to be ahead of the <strong>com</strong>petition by linking fundamental<br />
values in the market with <strong>com</strong>ing events,” he explains. “For<br />
example, I witnessed the advent of the discount store in the retail<br />
industry. This was a major event. You went from traditional retailing<br />
to malls, and then along came the discounters. These creatures hadn’t<br />
existed before. I also witnessed interesting developments in the<br />
chemical and aerospace industries. The ‘space age’ stocks offered<br />
many opportunities, from the landing of Sputnik in 1957 through the<br />
early 1960s. I was a frequent contributor to Barron’s then and wrote<br />
pieces on rocketry, high-energy fuels, and space-age materials. That’s<br />
where the action was.”<br />
It was Alan Abelson, the then-managing editor of Barron’s, who<br />
first gave Stovall a crack at bylined journalism in the late 1950s. For<br />
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