M Stanley’s bearish strategist quits job

Bloomberg

No reason was given for the departure, which came 17 months after he moved from JPMorgan Chase & Co.

His 2008 prediction for the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index was the most accurate on Wall Street and still missed by 622 points. Chakrabortti predicted the benchmark gauge would finish last year at 1,525, a projection that proved too high after $1 trillion of bank losses sent stocks to their worst year since the Great Depression. He said U.S. banks were fairly valued in November before they fell an average 38 percent.

In the two years before coming to Morgan Stanley, Chakrabortti, 41, was the most bearish forecaster among strategists tracked by Bloomberg. He predicted the S&P 500 would drop 9.9 percent in 2006 and gain 1.5 percent in 2007. The index climbed 14 percent and 3.5 percent, making his call the most prescient of 2007.

"I’m going to miss his research," said Guillermo Araoz, director of equity analysis at Morgan Asset Management, which oversees $30 billion in Birmingham, Alabama. "He was in the top-tier of equity strategists on Wall Street."

Morgan Stanley dropped to 10th from ninth place in Institutional Investor magazine’s 2008 survey of the top equity research firms.