Can you really believe Wall Street analysts?

This week, Barron's published a study showing the performance of seven firms' "focus list" stock recommendations. These are the investing firms supposedly with "best minds" in Wall Street supported by the most powerful computers and research teams. So you should expect that these highest recommendations from them should generate the largest gains to easily outperform the market. Did they?

In 2014, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, RBC Capital Markets, Wedbush Securities and Stifel Financial Management all underperformed the S&P 500. Wedbush and Stifel actually posted negative returns.

Lesson? Don't believe those WS analysts. Rather, you should go against them!