“Subu Ganesan usually ignores stock recommendations from Wall Street research analysts. He doesn’t even know the ratings they have on his stocks, he says. But when Mr. Ganesan, who works at a hedge fund called Rudman Capital, was contacted in June by an analyst at brokerage firm Raymond James & Associates, he was all ears,” writes Gregory Zuckerman in today’s Wall Street Journal.

“The analyst invited him to join a half-dozen other big investors for a lunch with executives of Interface Inc., a carpet maker. At the lunch, the investors peppered the executives with questions and were told that a private nylon maker was set to add production. To Mr. Ganesan, this suggested that a recent rise in nylon prices was likely to abate — good news for one of his holdings, Mohawk Industries Inc., which also makes carpets.”

“ ‘That’s a data point I can’t get anywhere else,’ Mr. Ganesan says.”

“The Raymond James analyst, Sam Darkatsh, sat quietly during the meeting, as he does at other sessions he sets up between institutional investors and corporate executives. ‘We give access to decision makers,’ he says. ‘I am primarily the chaperone.’ ”

“It’s a role Wall Street firms increasingly are playing. In the past year or so, at least eight big securities firms have set up units that work full time to arrange intimate meetings between their investor clients and corporate executives.”

“For analysts and brokerage-firm employees, the new role can be more like a concierge than a number-cruncher. They brief corporate executives on the backgrounds and holdings of the investors they’ll meet and what they may be asked about. They make hotel reservations and arrange for cold beverages at the meetings, even in one case fetching fresh underwear for an executive who lost his luggage. Sometimes analysts become tour guides, leading investors through offices and factories.”

“ ‘It may seem hokey, but it isn’t unusual to see an analyst with a megaphone leading a bus tour of investors through a company facility’, says Richard Goldsmith, global head of North American Equities at Deutsche Bank AG.”

“Big investors have always liked to talk with corporate executives, and analysts have long taken a role at times in bringing the sides together. But in the wake of rules barring companies from selective disclosure of material information, investors are more eager for informal get-togethers with executives. While the executives remain under the disclosure restrictions, they can amplify on already disclosed developments. And the investors can engage them in wide-ranging discussions about prospects for the company and competitors — and notice their ‘body language’ — in hopes of picking up a useful nugget or two.”

“ ‘The meetings are not new but they’re more prominent now,’ says Rick Buoncore, chief executive of Victory Capital Management in Cleveland. Regulatory changes have ‘made companies stop in their tracks in terms of talking directly to research analysts’ about sensitive information, he says. So investors are going directly to companies, often with help from a brokerage firm or investment bank.”

“Yet the trend — even as it responds to regulatory efforts to level the investment playing field — is raising fresh questions about whether big investors again are finding preferential access to information.”