As a follow-up to the article on the demise of Sales & Trading, this shows how sell-side research goes hand-in-hand with S&T. Unfortunately, S&T revenues include something called “soft dollars” which are commonly allotted to pay for research provided to buy-side customers. This week an article published on bloomberg.com highlights how the Research industry has seen a significant decline alongside trading revenues. Here’s a link to the article, followed by some excerpts in case you’ve reach your limit in Bloomberg article views:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-19/analyst-jobs-vanish-as-a-perfect-storm-hits-wall-street-research

The relentless decline of brokerage research is accelerating. Its ranks shrank 8% to 3,500 across 12 major banks, data showed earlier this year, on pace for the sharpest annual decrease since research firm Coalition Development started collating the numbers in 2012.

Eventually, the cuts will stop. Larry Tabb, founder of Tabb Group, sees research providers consolidating and resourceful asset managers beefing up their internal analysis. The question is where that leaves the rest, as well as small-caps that may consequently receive less attention from Wall Street.

And it will be too late for folks like Howell, who is flummoxed to see his career vanish even as stock markets reach all-time highs.

“I don’t think equity research will go away, by any means,” he says. “There’s definitely still a need for it, but at the end of the day it’s going to be a fair amount smaller than it is even now.”