Mary Meeker Queen of the Net?

Posted on September 23, 2005 , filed under Business Gossip, Stocks | Print This Post

I wonder why they let analysts like Mary Meeker, who was once proclaimed the Queen of the Net, continue to publish bullish reports that outline long term strategies when their records are less than stellar.

Here is a quote from a business week article:

Morgan Stanley (MWD) analyst Mary Meeker explained why she is bullish on the Internet and China in an interview with BusinessWeek, published Friday. “Is information in China as widely available as in the U.S.?” she asked during an interview. “No. Is information more widely available in China today than it was five years ago? Absolutely. What’s the reason for that? The Internet.”

The analyst said she is excited about China’s Internet market because “it’s the combination of one of the biggest markets in the world with the biggest evolution agents. We have defined it as an emerging market meeting an emerging market.”

While the BusinessWeek interview had Meeker praising several U.S.-based Internet companies as major beneficiaries of China’s march to the Web, she identified one Chinese firm, Tencent, as a potential winner. The Shanghai-based company offers an advanced instant-messaging application.

Meeker recently completed a study of Internet-related opportunities in China. Read the report.

Here’s some information on Mary’s previous performance:

Mary became famous for her predictions on Amazon and Priceline. Too bad her predictions only go one way. She failed to correctly advise clients in December 2000 to get out of .com stocks. Meanwhile the 11 stocks she rated “outperform” were down 83 percent. Morgan Stanley was the underwriter for 8 out of the 11 stocks Mary recommended.

It seems odd to me how quickly people forget articles like Fortune Magazines – Where Mary Meeker Went Wrong. I wonder how anyone could trust her research or recommendations again.

This sounds like a case of extreme greed. Why would anyone trust her long term predictions on China if her track record was an abysmal 83 percent down by the end of the .com bull run. That’s no long term strategy to me. That sounds like a short term method to capitalize on greed in China. The government should pass some kind of law to protect the general public from misleading research if an analyst’s performance drops below a certain threshold. This would be such a beneficial law, if the analyst’s research is widespread enough to be read by the general public.

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