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conversation would go something like this: “Hey, Robert [Morris, Goldman Sachs’s top-rated telecom analyst]. What’s going on? We haven’t talked in a while.” Knowing exactly what was up, Morris would say, “You know, I’ve got my model here in front of me and I wondered if my revenue growth projection of 25.3 percent this year was within range.” We would then launch into a little game of “warmer,” “colder,” until Morris “divined” that his quarterly projection for MCI’s earnings per share was a penny or two too low. He’d thank us, hang up, and call his sales force to announce that he had just spoken to management (i.e., me) and that he felt good about how the quarter was shaping up, so he had decided to increase his MCI forecast. Brilliant.
    We’d usually call two or three analysts at about the same time, but Morris was consistently the first to call back and the first to get his updated forecast out. Like magic, when the NASDAQ opened at 9:30 AM , MCI shares traded up. By the time the other analysts called back, Goldman’s sales force had informed virtually every buy-side analyst and portfolio manager in the Western world of the new forecast. And then the other sell-side analysts—the ones we hadn’t called—would start getting calls from buy-side clients asking what they thought of Goldman’s earnings increase and what, if anything, they had heard from MCI.
    They’d flood our phone lines, and we’d simply say that Morris had been going over his model and increased it. “That seemed okay to us,” we’d say. They then revised their estimates, and the boost to our stock price caused by Morris’s earlier update held firm. If you were among the largest institutional money managers, you had it made. If you were an individual investor, you were inevitably too late to the party; the stock had already risen and you’d missed its move.
    On the other hand, if the news was bad, we might also call a few of the most influential analysts, but, more often, we would pack up and, with minimal notice, fly to Boston for a day of meetings. Boston was where the largest and most powerful mutual funds were located, companies such as Fidelity, Putnam, and many others. We always booked Fidelity first, at 8:00 AM , and then usually Putnam at 9:30 AM , followed by Wellington, MFS, State Street Research, and other large institutional investors.
    The meetings were almost always the same: with a group of 15 or so Fidelity portfolio managers, including the famous Peter Lynch, watching, Fidelity’s telecom analyst would run us through a grueling series of questions regarding every line on MCI’s income statement. Fidelity’s portfolio managers paid attention to every word we spoke, every number that left our lips, even our tones of voice and facial expressions. Eventually, it would dawn on someone that we were guiding down our earnings estimates, at which point the Fidelity portfolio managers would suddenly bolt out of the room, hustle down to Fidelity’s trading floor, and tell their in-house traders to sell MCI shares when the market opened at 9:30 AM . Brilliant again.
    These various Fidelity portfolio managers, armed with an inside edge that no one else had, would now be racing to unload their MCI shares ahead of their competitors at other money management firms. FIDO, as the Street called it, wouldn’t exactly make money on a morning like this. Rather, it wouldn’t lose money when the stock fell on our bad news. Many others didlose money, however. They were the ones buying the shares that Fidelity was unloading at 9:31 AM .
    It was a fate that other institutional investors couldn’t avoid. And the little guy, the individual investor, the retiree? If they owned a Fidelity mutual fund, it worked to their advantage—this time. No wonder Fidelity was the country’s investment darling. But if they didn’t, they were out of luck. It was my first lesson that life on the Street, with its uneven information