Confessions of a Wall Street Analyst is an older book from 2007 which focuses on the telecom sector when it was going through massive changes. Several of the key people in the story were fined and went to jail and some of the high-flyers declared bankruptcy and engaged in fraud. This was before Eliot Spitzer went after Wall Street and new regulations stopped some of the practices that were standard on the Street prior to tech blow-up.
Nonetheless, Confessions of a Wall Street Analyst gives a good account of the pressure on Wall Street analysts to produce and deliver on timely information and forecasts concerning earnings and industry developments as well as company strategy. The analysts have to keep their firm happy, work the buy-side, and constantly deal with the CFOs from the companies they cover. They do this is a competitive environment where every analyst is watched and rated. This is not an easy job. These fundamental analysts now must compete with quants who crunch all the numbers looking for outliers and AI which can review hundreds of pages of text. The pressure is on. Yes, the rewards can be great but not like twenty years ago; however, there is now a strong bid from hedge funds, another pressure cooker.
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