When he appears before the United States Congress today, Mark Lackritz, president of the Securities Industry Association, will pledge that securities analysts will be reminded to only serve the needs of investors.

Appearing before a subcommittee of the Committee on Financial Services, the Lackritz will introduce the best practices for research analysts that the securities unveiled on Tuesday. “We succeed as an industry only when we succeed for investors. We succeed only when we serve investors in ways that help them reach their investing and saving goals. Period,” he’ll say.

Lackritz will defend the record of analysts, noting that even Michael Jordan, Babe Ruth, and Tiger Woods have off years, and Tom Cruise makes the odd bad movie.

Nevertheless he supports analysts by saying: there’s a difference between blowing a call and not trying to serve the interests of investors; and that analysts can differ in their interpretation of the facts, both at the micro level and the macro level.

Still, Lackritz will admit that analysts can be swayed to do the bidding of investment bankers. “Yes they can. We in the industry as well as those who regulate us long have been well aware of this.”

He will say that the SIA’s new best practices are intended to, “make an unambiguous re-commitment that analysts’ judgments are to be dictated solely by the data they find and by the insights they bring through their years of experience. We reaffirm that the securities analyst serves only one master: The investor. Not the issuer or the potential issuer.”