Is Bloomberg Trying To Start Shit With Meredith Whitney?

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Don't want to jump to any conclusions here, only asking because that seems to be the case with today's essay entitled "Whitney Falters in Trying to Repeat Success of Citigroup Call."

Yes, she had her bold call on Citi in October 2007. But is she really as great as she makes herself out to be? Bloomberg isn't so sure. Yeah, they know the Dollar Domatrix persona she gives off. They've seen it just like everyone else. And you know what? They're still skeptical. Why? Numbers have been crunched.

Since Whitney founded her own firm last year, about two- thirds of her picks have fared worse than market indexes. Missed calls include Visa Inc., the payments network that fell 14 percent after Whitney called it her “single best buy,” and credit-card issuer Capital One Financial Corp., which tripled after she urged clients to sell.

And there's the fact that she didn't make some list.

Even the best-performing Wall Street firms and individual stock pickers failed to predict the fall and rise of most big financial stocks, according to rankings in the November issue of Bloomberg Markets magazine. New York-based Goldman Sachs Group Inc. won the No. 1 spot by making 30 accurate calls on the 79 financial stocks its analysts follow. KBW Inc. analysts, including Sanjay Sakhrani, ranked second. Whitney didn’t make the list.

Plus this business.

Clients who took Whitney’s advice on April 1, 2009, to sell Citigroup, the company that cut its dividend 11 weeks after she said it would, missed out on a 46 percent gain. The S&P 500 returned 45 percent and the financials index 61 percent.

Of course, try asking the 'berg about the trash talk and they'll insist they're not trying to start shit and probably even mention something about Meredith Whitney being a friend of theirs. And that's what they better say--knowing what happened to the last mammal to question her.

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