Take my analyst, please. (Investments & Finance).

WHAT good is Wall Street research anyway?

The question is on the table after a year of investigation and recrimination. Since the collapse of Enron Corp. in the fall of 2001 led off a parade of financial scandals, the analysis of stocks produced by brokerage and investment banking firms has been portrayed as corrupted by conflicts of interest, and pretty much useless besides.

"For the market as a whole, research is a deadweight cost that turns a zero-sum game into a losers game," wrote the elder statesman of the mutual-fund industry, Vanguard Group founder Jack Bogle, in the Wall Street Journal.

It's no small business. The Association of Investment Management and Research, which administers the professional designation known as chartered financial analyst, reports a membership of almost 50,000.

For the sake of argument, lets stipulate to the charge that stock research published by brokers and investment bankers can never be assumed to be simon-pure objective. The truly disinterested person is a rare creature, especially when there's money on the line.

Let's also stipulate that in a highly "efficient" marketplace, an analyst's buy, sell or hold recommendation distributed to all a firm's customers can't give any individual investor much of an edge.

Analysts as a group cannot succeed at outsmarting the market, inasmuch as they ARE the market. OK, but who created this efficiency in the first place? Why, it's those same analysts, churning out their reports. Though the quality of their information may vary all over the lot, in.sum it helps set the price of each stock pretty close to where it ought to be.

If the research didn't do that with some degree of utility, we can surmise, it would be much easier than it is to find inefficiencies -- opportunities to beat the market. While there may be no way to put a number on it, market efficiency is of enormous value to a free economy. That's the other common meaning of the term efficiency -- functioning smoothly, getting the job done.

Long before the current bear market, all alert investors knew that Wall Street research was subject to bias. Yet they kept reading it and listening to it, as people heed other commercial information such as advertising and sales talk. Though we know the car dealer or the real estate broker has an ax to grind, we consult them anyway. Chances are they can tell us things we can't find out so easily anywhere else. While prospecting for this knowledge, we never forget to consider the source.

It's naive, at best, to look to these commercial sales people and marketers for simple recommendations of what and when to buy or sell. These final decisions are too important and too personal to make on that basis.

So if we somehow manage to create a system that assures us of unbiased research, the doctrine of buyer-beware will still apply. Even so, expect investors to demand more information and analysis, not less, in the future. However you weigh it, stock research is a long way from dead.