Stacy Rasgon has been on Twitter since 2011, but she recently realized that her tweets were a bit boring.
“These are pictures of children and airline seats,” he thought, noting that his employer, global asset management firm Bernstein, does not allow him to tweet about semiconductor companies or most of the things that have to do with industry covering as managing director and senior analyst there.
Then, one of his followers asked him what a typical profit night is like. He responded with a thread explaining the process Wall Street analysts go through on a typical earnings afternoon, which generally runs into the wee hours of the morning or early morning, sometimes as late or early as 4 am
“I thought maybe there is a way to be a little bit more interesting without conflicting with [Bernstein] social media policy, ”he said.
That first Twitter thread received positive feedback from customers and input from his company, where he recently led a session for junior analysts on “How to Succeed on the Sales Side,” which was based on one of his threads. He will also hold a session at Bernstein’s “summer school”.
Since last month, when he answered that initial question, Rasgon has written threads on other topics of interest to investors and financial reporters, discussing everything from earnings conference calls to how to interact with customers (the buyer / admin side). of funds), how to deal with the media, the art of writing titles for investigative reports, and how he got his job on Wall Street.
Rasgon’s path to Wall Street was not a standard route. He said that most analysts start at a company, eventually become junior or associate analysts and advance to the job of senior analyst. However, Rasgon joined Bernstein Research at McKinsey & Co., where he had been a consultant focused on semiconductor companies, his first job after earning a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Chemical Engineering.
For two graduate summers, Rasgon had worked at IBM Corp. of IBM,
Watson Research Center, where he was a cooperative engineer working on advanced lithography and processes used in semiconductor manufacturing. Rasgon joined Bernstein in April 2008, during the financial crisis and just after Bear Stearns’ failure.
“When I started, I had no Wall Street experience, I didn’t know the difference between the buy side and the sell side,” he said. “I knew operationally what a good semiconductor company was, but I didn’t know how to talk to customers or the sales force. No one understood anything he was talking about.
There would be mistakes along the way. A funny thread journalists like yours really found fascinating featured a story about the so-called callbacks companies make to individual sales analysts after their public earnings calls. The callback gives companies the opportunity to emphasize certain points to analysts, as well as “participate in damage control” if they “put their foot in their mouths on the call,” which, Rasgon parenthetically noted, ” happens”.
In this particular case, Rasgon said that some companies are trying to get analysts to give them information about their financial models or their estimates, so that they can properly guide them in the right direction.
“Suffice it to say that in my first earnings season I was unfamiliar with the concept of ‘callback,'” Rasgon wrote. “I knew I had some kind of IR phone call scheduled later, but I really didn’t understand what it was for.”
Rasgon said the investor relations executive called from a company and, after reviewing a ton of data, bluntly asked, “What is your number?” Rasgon’s financial models are quite complex, and when he said he hadn’t even started working on his model, the IR person was silent, then said thank you and hung up: Rasgon then acknowledged that the company had been trying to run his model.
“This particular company was on the aggressive side,” Rasgon added in his Twitter thread. “That level of ‘help’ is not typical in my experience.” He added that some companies will not say anything beyond their public conference call or earnings script. “There has to be a happy medium,” he said.
Part of what Rasgon does is akin to financial journalism: Trying to write a headline that’s eye-catching, and then telling a story that investors – not everyone understands the minutiae of the semiconductor industry – can understand. He said he spends a lot of time trying to think of a title for his company’s reports and, of course, the content they contain.
“About one in five of my titles [gets] rejected, “he said. He also noted that any title with a game reference track is immediately rejected by Bernstein’s compliance department.
Some catchy Rasgon headlines that were released include “Evel Knievel Lives?” which outlined a 2019 forecast for Advanced Micro Devices Inc. AMD,
which required a “mid back ramp [in revenue] That would make Evel Knievel nervous. AMD actually reported a great quarter, but data center sales were below expectations.
A fun one during QCOM from Qualcomm Inc.,
legal saga with Apple Inc. AAPL,
He compared the murky situation on his communication chips to the famous fame of the Jibberish-speaking Prus Itt of Addams and famous hirsute, in a note called, “Qualcomm FQ1 2020 Recap – Cousin Itt?”
“There is enough hair to keep us on the sidelines,” he wrote.
After Nvidia Corp. NVDA,
CEO Jensen Huang, in a video launch of the COVID-19 era, opened the oven in his home kitchen to present a host of new products, the Rasgon headline was simply, “Cooking with Jensen ”
Rasgon’s enthusiasm for his work and his enthusiasm for the unstable world of semiconductors are contagious, even in our brief conversation. And now he’s found a way to combine that passion with ease of writing to draw customers, and the press, to his complex research via Twitter TWTR,
It seems to be working.
“It is a fun job,” he said. “I can write about what interests me.” But the most important element of the job is clients, and he has learned to put them first, he said. “If you don’t like people and can’t succeed in building relationships, you will fail on the sales side, no matter how good your stock picks are.”
.
