[...] Wall Street research has gone awry, Tarasoff began in his letter. The emphasis on the All-America Research Team 'was an insidious development for our profession because it focused much of the research community's attention on the wrong goals and led to a number of unfortunate practices that survive to this day.' Thus, effective immediately, the firm would abolish several of those unfortunate practices, starting with its rating system. No more buy, hold, or sell ratings on the stocks covered by Cowen. Its analysts would still have investment opinions, Tarasoff hastened to add, but they would express those opinions 'the old-fashioned way, using the full richness of the English language.'

Cowen was also abolishing a second pillar of modern securities analysis: the quarterly earnings note. 'Most of these voluminous postmortems serve no purpose and consume considerable resources,' Tarasoff wrote. 'This policy will ensure that our analysts write only when they have something important to say.' Finally, in place of ratings and earnings notes, S.G. Cowen would stress 'good investment ideas' and 'proprietary information flow.' That is, the firm would publish research only when it had some unique value and could not easily be duplicated by competitors.