At bulge bracket firms, thanks to Eliot Spitzer and others, compliance is extremely strict. You are either strongly discouraged or banned from buying stocks or sectors that you cover if you are a sector analyst. Even when you try to buy or sell other stocks outside your coverage, you can't do it when there are client orders and there are ALWAYS orders for large cap stocks. So I chose to slowly build up a portfolio of high dividend stocks when I could. I actually did most of my buying during gardening leave in between changing firms.

Being a highly paid analyst at the institutional level isn't really about getting your calls right all the time anyway. I estimate that I had a 60% hit rate, which is considered good. Your success is measured by mainly by the number of votes that the institutional investors give you in a confidential communication between the sellside firm and the buyside institution. There are also other factors like external rankings in Institutional Investor Magazine and services that mechanically evaulate your calls and earnings estimates like Starmine.