Has Goldman Sachs run out of special sauce? According to Meredith Whitney of Oppenheimer, yes:. In 2008, she says, "Goldman Sachs will probably deliver results that will not be substantially better than its peers," and as a result she’s downgraded the bank to "perform" from "outperform".
We all know that past performance is not a guide to future results, but this is still a brave call: Goldman has a habit of finding formerly-obscure departments which suddenly become enormously profitable. Still, Goldman’s share price has a lot of good news built in, while shares in its competitors have bad news built in. Which means the best-performing stocks aren’t always the best-performing companies.