This broker calls his customer for four straight years and each time puts him into some dreadful stock that drops right through the floor. The fifth year, the customer calls the broker and says, "Look: I don't know about all these stocks we've been buying - I think maybe I'd be better off with bonds."

"Yeah, sure," says the broker - "but what do I know about bonds?" - an old joke.

First investor: "Was your broker ambivalent about the market?"
Second investor: "Well, yes and no." - another old joke.

Brokers are not necessarily completely independent when they give advice on stocks. There are three reasons why they are not necessarily speaking without bias.

First of all their interest is in getting new clients who will put their money with the firm, and as such it helps always to be nice and bullish and never suggest anything is ever going to go down.

Secondly, and rather importantly, brokers try to cultivate relationships with companies so they will get future business out of them when the company wishes to issue new stock, rights issues, dividend reinvestment plans, mergers or spinoffs. All of these can be just as profitable for brokers as the retail side of things which involves recommending stock to clients.

There is a third reason also. Brokers can put themselves in the path of law suits from companies that feel unjustly wronged by a broker. A sell recommendation can be dangerous, while there isn't a lot of legal precedent it is a fear by analysts that the companies they disparage will bite back somehow, either through litigation or by striking back at the broker's reputation or encouraging other companies take their business elsewhere. As a result there are very few times when a broker will be so outrageous as to issue a sell recommendation for large corporations, usually pathetic little speculative issues will get that recommendation, but no broker will risk a confrontation with a market giant.

To quote from Why It Is So Difficult To Sell, by Donald L. Cassidy (in The Psychology of Investing, Lawrence Lifson and Richard Geist (eds), John Wiley and Sons, 1999, p. 32):

One study cited in The American Association of Individual Investors (AAII) Journal recently said that there are about eight "buy" recommendations for every "sell" advice. Research departments are cost centers and so in most brokerage firms must be politically correct by never using the S-word, especially when related to actual or potential corporate finance clients. It is probably an ultimate irony that the most commonly used alternative advice, "hold", literally has the opposite intended meaning. One must understand the foreign tongue known as brokerage-ese. Other common translations of the word sell, roughly in order of faintness of praise implied, include the following:

* Accumulate
* Long-term buy
* Market performer
* Market weight
* Perform in line
* Underperform
* Underweight