“Sell side level work”

You’re not wrong, there are sell side guys to listen to. But, you do have to filter the guys who just regurgitate the 8Ks / investor presentations. This is assuming you want to leverage sell side for analysis. I could care less if an analyst has a correct thesis if he can turnaround a management meeting for me within the week. 

I tend to find sell side initiations to be quite good, you can tell when someone has really done their homework in that type of piece.

"If you just listened to the right person at the right time"

As someone on the buyside putting capital to work, your entire value add is comprised of listening to the right person at the right time. If sell side analysts were consistently correct, there would be no reason for buysiders to exist. Those sell side guys should be the ones allocating capital. Feels like a bit of a circular discussion here.

That's part of it, but not exactly what sell-side is used for nowadays.

You provide industry contacts, corp events, and you are part of "consensus" which is the benchmark for what is considered contrarian.    

Agreed w/ Acidophilus and SanityCheck. sell side is not paid to be right about stocks - that's a bonus and there's certainly money to be made there for an analyst who can do that, but that's not your core function. and those who are good at it usually find themselves over to the buyside quite quickly. so in that regard, there's minimal incentive to do "buyside level" work on the sell side, since you're not paid proportionately for it.

The best sellside value add comes from mgmt meetings that I couldn’t attend or from earnings callbacks. Longer-term, not a lot of value besides initiations.

I know some top sellside people who get paid in gold (Bellini) but LT they are tied to a secularly challenged business (buyside) so LT doesn’t look too great.

But since you started the thread OP, which sellside guys have you found worthy of calling out? I don’t mean on BS price targets but on actual value add via previews or your convos with them.

There are plenty of excellent sell-side analysts. You just have to find the 1-2 analysts that matter for each name. Half the buyside investors I know rely mostly on the sell side for analysis and channel checks anyway, or on expert network calls that effectively mirror sell-side with a bit more color.  

Part of the problem is that, post Mifid 2, the biggest buyers of research are the multi-manager pods and so a lot of the sell-side research I see now is geared towards that customer base. I see fewer and fewer detailed industry reports/initiations and a lot more focus on quarterly previews.

I love sell-side research, though it is fundamentally different than investment analysis at a hedge fund. HFs have some view that they want to express, while equity research folks curate their top ten lists. It’s like being a book shopper (who’s interested in a romantic historical fiction set in 18th century Paris) and going to a bookstore. The folks there know books intimately and would be able to help you find a set of books that meet your interest. But from there you probably will want to read the flap, look at other reviews, and skim through a bit first.