Here’s the latest sideline for the “Love Guv.”
Eliot Spitzer moved Tuesday to resurrect an even older nickname — “the sheriff of Wall Street” — which he earned while taking the financial industry to task as New York attorney general.
This time, though, Spitzer isn’t fining Wall Street analysts but grading them. And he’s doing so as an investor in TipRanks, a Web site that rates people in the business of giving financial advice.
TipRanks was founded in June 2012 by Israeli college pals Uri Gruenbaum and Gilad Gad, who together put up $700,000 in seed money.
Their motivation was to bring accountability to fancy analysts and financial bloggers — whose recommendations, as TipRanks’ founders learned the hard way, often led investors astray. Their Web site tracks the advice of 3,100 sell-side analysts and 3,500 bloggers and ranks their performance .
“ [Spitzer] loved the idea,” Gruenbaum said — so much so that he joined Cornell professor Roni Michaely and angel investor John Nakamura in putting up $3 million for TipRanks.