Evercore ISI released its list of best core ideas. Two dividend payers made the cut. The firm did not specify which two. The firm did not specify who else made the grade. The firm probably sent this information to clients who pay six figures a year for research while you get a headline that says "here's who else made the grade" and then provides zero f*cking names.
This is premium content. For analysts. Not for you.
Somewhere a retail trader read this headline and thought he learned something. He opened his Robinhood app. He searched "Evercore ISI top picks" on Reddit. He found a thread from 2019. He bought three shares of a company that got delisted in 2022. He feels informed.
The technical setup here is pristine. When analysts add stocks to a list, those stocks go up or down or sideways. I have backtested this across four decades. The correlation between analyst upgrades and future returns is roughly equivalent to the correlation between Cramer's face color and the VIX. Which is to say it exists if you torture the data long enough.
Dividend payers joined the list. Not growth stocks. Not crypto. Not AI chips. Dividends. The kind of thing your grandfather bought when he still trusted institutions and wore a hat to the office. Evercore ISI looked at the entire market and said these two companies that mail you checks every quarter represent their best thinking. Their core ideas. The intellectual peak of their research department is identifying firms that return cash to shareholders, a concept invented in approximately 1602.
The real alpha was buying before the list came out, but you did not have access to the list before it came out because you do not pay Evercore ISI a quarter million dollars a year.
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