We had total freedom to give any rating we could justify. We downgraded banking names under coverage, or gave unfavorable ratings to some of the names that bank

We had total freedom to give any rating we could justify. We downgraded banking names under coverage, or gave unfavorable ratings to some of the names that bankers wanted us to add to coverage. These sometimes led to calls from banking (moderated and monitored by compliance) demanding to know why we did such a thing, or my director of research receiving emails from companies that thought they deserved more favorable ratings that would personally insult my team. We nevertheless made the right calls for our investors to the best of our abilities, and I'll always stand by that. I've been on a bunch of aggressive calls and they always get my pits sweaty. I was on a few with the senior analyst I started working under that I really remember. We had a contentious sell call on a stock and one of their top 10 holders wanted to speak with us. We hopped on the conference call and they brought every one of their covering analysts, PM's, and even a trader onto the call just to try and talk us out of our rating. It was one of those calls where we knew neither side would find an agreement, but ultimately we both got a better understanding of where our disagreements lay, which helped better inform both sides about debates in the stock. The cursing and aggression from these clients made that call especially tough. On a different note, I found the former sell-side turned buy-side analysts to be the toughest clients to work with. They know exactly how the research game is played, but several seemed to have an especially large chip on their shoulder and wanted to badger the sell-side guys since they had taken that beating for years.