As Fortis gurgled down the plughole a month ago, chief executive Herman Verwilst lamented, feebly, that most “recent analyst reports give price targets significantly higher than today’s stock price”. He had a point although not the intended one. Top-down valuations have their drawbacks. Meanwhile, markets manipulated by spasmodic state interventions and distorted by the sin-binning of short sellers, have made a mockery of rigorous, bottom-up analysis too. A note from Nomura last week admitted that aligning market movements with fundamentals “is virtually impossible”. As investment banks re-examine their reasons for being, what future for their research departments?

The personal stock of equity analysts was downgraded long before this crisis. US analysts’ success in predicting profits peaked in the fourth quarter of 2000, the year that new laws on equal access to price-sensitive information were adopted. Accuracy levels have fallen for six of the seven years since, according to Bloomberg, reaching a record low in the second quarter this year.