“They were the rock stars of Wall Street — but now they’re out of tune, and in some cases, out of gigs,” writes Ken Brown in today’s Wall Street Journal.

“Big-name stock-research analysts have always been well-known among the legions of professional Wall Street investors, but in the past few years, they have also become celebrities. They were paid princely sums. They were regulars on TV and on magazine covers. Followers hung on their every word.”

“No more. The stocks that analysts once touted have long since been wrecked by last year’s collapse of the Nasdaq Composite Index, which has swooned 62% since its March 2000 peak. Many investors who followed those bullish calls have been plain out of luck.”

“Now, it’s the analysts’ turn to suffer. Henry Blodget, whose once-soaring career as an Internet-stock analyst epitomized the technology-stock craze, said this week he is leaving Merrill Lynch. Other analysts who helped pump the air into the tech-stock bubble of the late 1990s could be next amid broad cutbacks at Wall Street firms, some Wall Street people say. All eyes are on other top analysts — from Mary Meeker, who follows Internet stocks at Morgan Stanley, to Jack Grubman, who handles telecommunications stocks for Salomon Smith Barney.”

“Mr. Blodget declined to comment. But people close to him say he wasn’t wanted at Merrill, and that he plans to finish a book on the Internet and become an investor. Morgan Stanley and Salomon say that their big-name analysts aren’t celebrities, that they are just as valuable as they have ever been, and that they aren’t going anywhere.”

“But there is no denying that the era of the cult-like analyst is over. ‘Celebrities last as long as their stories last,’ says Neal Gabler, author of “Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality.” ‘Liz Taylor lasts a long time because she keeps on getting married; if you no longer have any narrative to unspool, your celebrity is over.’ “

“That is particularly true on Wall Street, because the sexiest part of the tale is money. ‘When money gets withdrawn from the story, the story loses its legs,’ adds Mr. Gabler.”

“Actually, the impact of analysts’ demise as superstars could be a good thing. That’s because the fallout from analysts’ calls have made investors jaded and less likely to blindly follow the advice of analysts, who in many cases were conflicted because they were paid partly based on the amount of investment-banking business they brought to their firms.”

” ‘It is the end of the era where people think you can put money in the market and it will automatically go up,’ said Ann Miletti, a portfolio manager at Strong Funds. Now, she says, individual investors ‘can see through most of this.’ “