The Ignorant Investor

NEW YORK (Reuters) - For more than a decade, Tom Berquist enjoyed life as a software analyst at Goldman Sachs and then Citigroup, delving into the latest technology and rubbing elbows with the executives of new, fast-growing firms.

But next month Berquist joins the exodus of Wall Street's sell-side analysts when he moves to a small software company himself, becoming chief financial officer of closely held Ingres Corp.

The reason? Mountains of red tape imposed by the government in the wake of the Internet bubble, which he says limited his ability to gather information from small companies that were thinking of going public with an initial stock offering.

Jeez, Tom, maybe if the stock analysts out there had done their jobs properly the regulators wouldn't have had to step in. Maybe, just maybe, if the analysts had suggested selling stocks occasionally to the retail customer and had been quick to point out just how overvalued the market was in the late 1990s, analysts could be trusted with a little more freedom.

I got no sympathy for these whiners. They were pleased to get the big bucks for doing a crap job years ago, and now they're whining about the world their own perfidious greed hath wrought. There may be honest analysts out there, but if you read the article, what comes across is a kind of blame the victim attitude that is totally inappropriate given the history of the late 1990s.

Man, that article really pissed me off. I'm probably overreacting. But there's something smug about guys like Berquist that rubs me the wrong way.