By Robert Powell, MarketWatch BOSTON (MarketWatch) Sometimes you just gotta love Wall Street for calling a spade anything but a spade. Consider, at a place and time such as this, with the economy teetering on the verge of another recession, none of the 1,485 stocks that make up the S&P 1,500 has a consensus "Sell" rating. And just five, or 0.3%, are ranked as being a "Weak Hold." And what's just as bad is that sell-side analysts seemingly don't have a strong opinion on what's worth buying either, according to an analysis just published by Sam Stovall, the chief investment strategist of Standard & Poor's Equity Research. Just 79 (or 5%) of the 1485 stocks have consensus "Buy" recommendations, while 1,003 (68%) are ranked "Buy/Hold," 398 (27%) are ranked "Hold." To be fair, Stovall noted that some analysts do have "Sell" recommendations on individual issues but that's not enough (from my vantage point) to suggest that Wall Street research analysts should be viewed with anything but skepticism bordering on cynicism. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/th...-say-sell-2011-09-07?link=MW_home_latest_news
