While meeting with investors in Paris this week, several raised the question whether the U.S. stimulus is working yet.  Most corporations are certainly not yet seeing any direct benefits and the worry on investor minds is that the markets are getting way ahead of reality because the stimulus is only going to start trickling down to companies next year and the real impact on corporate earnings will not show up until 2011-2012.

I’ve just come out of a session about the changing role of the sell-side and must say how surprised I was to hear so much bashing of the sell-side.  Clearly their business model is under a lot of pressure given the current environment but the sentiment in this very well attended session (standing room only) seemed to be against using the sell-side to facilitate corporate access because they no longer do a good job, don’t deliver the right investors and can’t get good feedback from PMs.  One of the speakers from the buy-side said they never tell the sell-side what they think about meetings.  One IRO stood up at the end of the session and said he was completely confused by the whole situation.  Strangely enough, the session next door on corporate social responsibility was not as well attended as it probably should have been.  What does this tell you about the issues most on everyone’s minds?

I’ve just finished my session on international outreach.  It was well attended and there were some good questions which showed people have a good grasp of targeting Europe.  I was lucky enough to have two great co-speakers in Bina Thompson of Colgate-Palmolive and Jeff Smith of FedEx, both of whom have a lot of experience in Europe.  If you missed the session and are interested in the presentation, you can access a copy of the slides as well as an audio recording by clicking on this link:  http://www.niristream.org/c/b.cgi?s=MKT2