NEW YORK (MONEY Magazine) - Analysts have faced some ferocious criticism lately -- much of it richly deserved.

Not only did the profession routinely bang the drums for investment banking business, but its stars took the extra step of spreading the word beyond the intended audience of institutional investors (who know the score) to individual investors by leaking the contents of their reports and endlessly blabbering before the cameras to tout their clients and build reputations for themselves.

Lost amid all this griping about analysts and their many scummy conflicts is the valuable role that an analyst can play for a smart, independent investor. You need all the help you can get, and a good analyst's report contains information that's either unavailable anywhere else, prohibitively expensive or extraordinarily difficult to obtain.

Just as analysts were worshipped beyond reason during the Internet bubble, they're now being discredited beyond reason.

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The key is to focus on the raw information, not the earnings estimate or the buy, sell or hold advice. Even if the call isn't meaningful, the facts behind it can still be important.

Morgan Stanley Internet analyst Mary Meeker became a celebrity for such dubious achievements as bringing to the public AskJeeves, Broadcast.com, Drugstore.com, Tickets.com and Women.com. Her assessments were sunny, but at the same time, her Internet Report gave readers a sound basis for understanding the potential of the Internet's explosion as a community and place for commerce long before the dotcom delirium.

Those who followed Meeker's recommendations risked the poorhouse. Those who used her voluminous research and reasoning to understand an unfamiliar field and develop their own conclusions became some of the best-informed technology investors.

One of my favorite analysts is Jason Ader, Bear Stearns' gambling and lodging eminence grise. In gambling parlance, "book" refers to whoever takes the bets, as in a sports book at a casino or a bookie at the corner tavern. But in the gambling industry, the most important book is the North American Gaming Almanac, updated every spring by Ader and his team at Bear Stearns.

The Gaming Almanac is analysis at its best: authoritative, exhaustive, in-depth, expert coverage on every element affecting an entire industry. Crammed with charts, statistics and bullet-point explanations, the 600-plus-page guide tells its reader more than even an addicted gambler could ever want to know about the business of chance.

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Interested in the household incomes, ages or occupations of America's gamblers? All there. Number of cars heading to Vegas from California? It's there, by year, month and percentage increase. It's a colossal collection of facts and figures that an individual investor could never assemble on his own.

More valuable than the numbers are the accompanying explanations. Anyone who follows the stocks of MGM-Mirage or Mandalay Resort Group might be interested to know that I-15 is being widened from four lanes to six. And someone looking at Harrah's, which is strong in Illinois, might appreciate learning that its win per position of $413 in Illinois dwarfs the $175 generated on the Las Vegas Strip. (Win per position -- the casino's revenue divided by every slot machine and seat at a table game -- is the most telling measure of a casino's health.)

I've relied on Ader for several years now and have watched his opinions regularly pan out. For a long time, he was the most negative analyst on Donald Trump's casinos, a call that has been vindicated -- and then some.

Even more useful than his correct calls is the annual tool he provides for making my own calls. A few years ago, I was considering the bonds of the Venetian, the Vegas megacasino built by Comdex founder Sheldon Adelson on the grounds of the famed Sands. Conventional wisdom was aligned against the property's success -- as an all-suite hotel with almost as much retail space as the town leader, Caesars Palace, the new place had too small a portion of its space devoted to gambling.

Heck, Adelson even put minibars and other luxury standards in the rooms, a Vegas first. How dare he delay a guest's march to the slots? With many investors expecting the worst, the bonds were paying handsomely.

Data in the Gaming Almanac, however, proved that on the Vegas Strip, non-gambling amenities were growing revenues much more quickly than gambling. The book also informed me that the Venetian had more convention space than the rest of the top 10 properties combined. I concluded that the bonds would fare much better than the market was expecting -- and have been proven correct.

So that's the value of a good analyst. Make your own decisions, but let these guys do the heavy lifting.