In 1995 my dream came true.  After a career at IBM, and MBA in finance and a stint as a VP of insti­tu­tional sales at a major Wall Street firm I was handed the keys to the kingdom — to be an equity ana­lyst on the sell side. Strangely enough the sec­tor I was hired to cover wasn’t avail­able since another ana­lyst had decided to “sit on it” because it looked too promis­ing.  For­tu­nately the firm I joined (Sound­View) was small at the time and the rest of soft­ware, my spe­cialty, was uncov­ered. My first day was inaus­pi­cious.  The only senior ana­lyst who I knew (and helped me get hired) came into my office after the morn­ing call and said “So how does it feel now that you just made the biggest mis­take of your life?!“  Then he laughed hard, turned on his heel and left.  (We’ll write more about our inter­ac­tions with this fel­low later.)   My boss was the head of research and was great at it.  But he wasn’t much of a talker and when he did the last thing he wanted to talk about is how you might do your job.   The train­ing pro­gram con­sisted of “you should cover some stocks.“ Our firm had spe­cial access to Gart­ner Group which was a wealth of infor­ma­tion to draw on.  After a few months I was ready to launch my first cov­er­age (a com­pany called Inter­Solv, sym­bol ISLI.) It started out well and blew up spec­tac­u­larly in my face a few months later (while I was in a rental car with a sales­man on the way to a client golf out­ing in Florida no less.)  So began my “edu­ca­tion” into a world in which our small ana­lyst team would ulti­mately dom­i­nate a very com­pet­i­tive space, being #1 often ver­sus firms like Gold­man Sachs in trad­ing and also being a co-manager on over 30 deals per­son­ally and hav­ing the largest mar­ket share in under­writ­ing in soft­ware.    This was a major suc­cess thanks to many fac­tors, as much insti­tu­tional sales, trad­ing and bank­ing as research.  There­fore learn­ing what these other groups do and how to work with them is a crit­i­cal aspect for suc­cess. The sur­pris­ing thing is that there is lit­tle, if any, for­mal instruc­tion on how become a suc­cess­ful sell-side ana­lyst in any busi­ness school cur­ricu­lum I have seen.  There aren’t any good books on it either.  Parts of the job are well doc­u­mented of course.  You can buy 100 books on finan­cial analy­sis and equity invest­ing but they are only a por­tion of the skill set that’s needed. The great sell-side equity ana­lyst is a com­bi­na­tion of qual­i­ties that will be described here in great detail.  Our goal is to explain every aspect, answer every ques­tion and pro­vide the basis for an indi­vid­ual to take some indus­try exper­tise, stock savvy, com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills, resource­ful­ness and a work ethic and forge it into being one of the best sell-side equity ana­lysts out there. Har­vard doesn’t teach it, nei­ther does MIT/Sloan, NYU or INSEAD.  There are many help­ful books that will cover major aspects of the diverse skill set we will talk about here and we will use every one of them. We have seen more help­ful courses and licens­ing stan­dards in the form of the CFA and also the Series 86/87 exams.  Again these pro­vide the rules and tools but not the win­ning tech­niques. At the same time the sell side has changed greatly over the last 10 years.  Research has changed and will change even more with it.  The skills will be the same but the con­text and the tools have changed.  We will be cov­er­ing that too.