Meredith Whitney Dumps Goldman Sachs Ahead of Earnings (GS)

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published

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Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (NYSE: GS) is on deck for earnings this week.  Its earnings news may have just been derailed by a key influential analyst call.  Meredith Whitney, now with Meredith Whitney Advisory Group rather than Oppenheimer, has come out and downgraded the stock.  Goldman Sachs was her only “BUY” rated stock before this morning, and now the rating has been taken down to “NEUTRAL” ahead of earnings.

If you go back to when she raised her rating to a BUY it was at much lower prices (roughly $141 before her call) and she did note that her buy rating at the time was solely on a trade basis.  Whitney has remained cautious ahead of Q4 on all the major banks because of consumer credit losses and additional writedowns.  While that may not be as large of a situation at Goldman Sachs since they have no real bank, the price is now $190.00 or was before this morning’s drop.

It is too early to get a real handle on its pre-market trading, but shares appear to be down around $187 or so after closing at $190.15 on Monday.

Happy earnings season.  You can join our open email distribution list to get updates each morning on analyst upgrades and downgrades, top day trader alerts, IPO’s and secondary offerings, Warren Buffett and other guru activity, M&A and more.

JON C. OGG
OCTOBER 13, 2009

Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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