Journalists are a pretty useless bunch who drink too much and should be kept at arm's length. That's a view many people in the markets openly or secretly harbour. Not Dresdner RCM Global Investors.
The fund management group has pioneered a concept called Grassroots research that employs the part-time services of 86 journalists around the world to write "market intelligence". These journalists work for specialist trade publications and write reports for Dresdner RCM on the side.
It pays a string of investigative journalists to find out the real story at companies it invests in or is thinking of investing in. The firm is finding this a particularly useful practice in Asia where the numbers published by companies look less and less reliable by the day, and the behind-the-scenes antics of senior management have come to the fore. This is the territory of journalists rather than analysts, and Dresdner RCM has 22 Asia-based scribes on its books.
Mark Konyn, Dresdner RCM's head of marketing, says the grassroots approach is so integral to its stockpicking exercise that the heads of the Grassroots operation - who collate the various journalist's reports - are empowered with a right of veto.