Earnings conference calls are usually predictable fare: a concise synopsis of results presented by company management, and then a structured Q&A session with a select group of Wall Street analysts.

This earnings season, several company management teams found themselves answering detailed questions from an unknown analyst - Joe Herrick of Gutterman Research. The only problem is – he’s an imposter, gaining access to the calls by posing as known analysts from major firms. His fifteen minutes of anonymous fame were sealed by a front-page article in The Wall Street Journal on February 16, 2008 which described his duplicitous accomplishments (read the article here ).

Let’s put the Gridstone Research Search feature to work to solve the mystery of the fake research analyst.

Our next call is from “Joe Herrick”

I started with a search for “Joe Herrick” across all documents in our database. This returned 11 results, all transcripts from companies in the consumer durables and non-durables sectors.

This result for Dean Foods shows his modus operandi - he introduces himself (correcting the operator who introduced him as the legitimate analyst that he impersonated), congratulates the management team, and launches into a question involving Six Sigma initiative.

Corporate executives invariably take his questions seriously, providing detailed answers where possible.

Other analysts, however, were calling his bluff as early as January 31, as seen on the Newell Rubbermaid call.

“Six Sigma”

I next ran a search on Six Sigma, Joe’s favorite topic, and filtered the results to show only transcripts.

Looking at the results from this angle, a few new potential aliases show up. For example, on the Jarden Corp. call, an analyst named Joe Harris from Global Research gets in a question.

…as does Andy Tyler of Toin Consulting on the Kraft Foods call.

A quick search of the database produces no other results for those analyst names.

A Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery…

While the mystery of Joe Herrick remains unsolved, this lighthearted example shows off the power of Gridstone Research’s search feature. The searches produced meaningful results across time and across all company documents. The results display enough content without requiring additional click-throughs (although in-context links to the source documents are provided). This reveals information that might not have been apparent at first (the imposter’s consistent line of questioning), allowing analysts to approach their research from a different angle.

Compare our deep “vertical” search to broad-based web searches, where opinion-based commentary typically outranks fact-based content. We’re sure you’ll enjoy discovering all these benefits by putting the Gridstone search engine to more serious use!