Non‐deal roadshows (NDRs) are private meetings between management and institutional investors, typically organized by sell‐side analysts. We find that around NDRs, local institutional investors trade heavily and profitably, while retail trading is significantly less informed. Analysts who sponsor NDRs issue significantly more optimistic recommendations and target prices, together with more “beatable” earnings forecasts, consistent with analysts issuing strategically biased forecasts to win NDR business. Our results suggest that NDRs result in a substantial information advantage for institutional investors and create significant conflicts of interests for the analysts who organize them.

Using hand‐collected biographical information on financial analysts from 1983 to 2011, we find that analysts making forecasts on firms in industries related to their preanalyst experience have better forecast accuracy, evoke stronger market reactions to earning revisions, and are more likely to be named Institutional Investor all‐stars. Plausibly exogenous losses of analysts with related industry experience have real financial market implications—changes in firms’ information asymmetry and price reactions are significantly larger than those of other analysts. Overall, industry expertise acquired from preanalyst work experience is valuable to analysts, consistent with the emphasis placed on their industry knowledge by institutional investors.

Analyst coverage has been cited increasingly as an important attribute in the selection of an underwriter for a firm about to go public. However, it has also been alleged that affiliated analysts provide biased research. In this study, we examine these interrelated issues by examining the long-run performance of IPOs with coverage from their managing underwriters in a 1993–2003 sample. We find that (1) analysts’ research coverage from their managing syndicate is not related to long-run performance; (2) long-run performance is not different for firms that receive all-star analyst coverage; and (3) investors are not systematically worse off for following lead underwriter recommendations.