The Restaurant Recession Indicator

If there’s one thing that long-time investors have come to know about Wall Street brokerage firms, it’s that their research analysts rarely tell you to “sell”.

To be sure, they say “buy” in many ways – “strong buy”, “buy”, “overweight” and “accumulate”, for example – but to simply say “sell” is not very common because Wall Street wants to show potential customers (not you, but the companies they are trying to woo as investment banking clients) that they will be boosters, not critics, of a company’s shares.