Agreed. In my opinion when firms are touting stocks to their clients they're dumping. And vice versa. When they tell their clients to sell they're loading the boat.
I use to subscribe to the Wall Street Journal before online trading and research was popular. And every so often (quarter I think) they'd ask 5 top analysts for their top stock pick and then compare the performance of those 5 stocks later to 5 stocks selected randomly by the throws of darts, what they called the dart board portfolio.
The WSJ did this for many years, they may still do it but I haven't picked up a Wall Street Journal newspaper for several years. But to get to my point, the amazing thing was that the dart board portfolios outperformed the top gurus portfolio the majority of the time, and often by huge margins LMAO!
And it's a proven fact that most money managers such as mutual fund managers, etc., over the long haul can't match the performance of the unmanaged S&P 500 Index. That alone should tell you something about analysts. I use to invest in stock mutual funds until I got sick and tired of the professionals losing my money most of the time (even in good markets) but still charging me fees. I figured that if I was going to lose money I might as well lose it on my own and at least be ahead by the fees that I save.
Best decision that I ever made.