(FORTUNE Magazine) – My job is to make people money," declares Merrill Lynch's Tom Kurlak. It's a laudable goal, but a hard one to reach with any consistency. Critics have long complained that much of the analysis coming from the brokerages and investment banks is either too late to be useful, too influenced by underwriting to be trusted, or just plain wrong.

With that in mind, we talked to the clients themselves--mutual fund managers, hedge fund chiefs, and other buy-side types--to find out which analysts actually make money for them, or save them money by keeping them out of stocks that turn out to be dogs. Some of the analysts we turned up are well known, others are still making names for themselves. But you can bet that when these men and women speak, billions of dollars hang on every word.

COMPUTER SERVERS: Laura Conigliaro, Goldman Sachs

"Without Laura, I would have self-immolated with Digital Equipment," says money manager James Cramer, describing how Conigliaro's warnings saved him millions of dollars in early 1996. Conigliaro has been in the business for 18 years and has a reputation for spotting clues others miss. Before coming to Wall Street, she worked for the National Security Agency. She still won't say exactly what she did at NSA, but notes that to succeed as an analyst, "it helps to be, if not a spy, then a really good investigator."

RESTAURANTS: Wayne Daniels, Schroder & Co.

Taking a negative stand on a stock that the Wall Street herd likes is never easy. Just ask Wayne Daniels. When he lowered his rating on Boston Chicken in May 1996, "I got angry phone calls and negative feedback from institutional holders," he says. "They just didn't want to hear it." Big mistake. Boston Chicken has proven to be a turkey, falling more than 60 percent since Daniels' downgrade.

IMAGING: Alex Henderson, Prudential Securities

For clients accustomed to wishy-washy opinions, Henderson is a breath of fresh air. Blunt and unafraid, Henderson once called Kodak's spending habits "bulimic" and admits that earlier in his career "people thought I was being disrespectful." Now it's the 40-year-old Henderson who gets the respect, producing 5,000 pages of occasionally biting research each year on the 30 stocks he covers.

FOOTWEAR & APPAREL: Faye Landes, Smith Barney

Landes shocked Wall Streeters out of their shoes with her April warning about future earnings weakness in Nike. "All hell broke loose," says Landes. Nike hotly disputed her opinion, but Landes refused to budge, and two months later the company confirmed that earnings would indeed come in below expectations.

OIL SERVICES: John Lovoi, Morgan Stanley

Lovoi earns high marks for sticking with his companies even when other backers start bailing. Cramer remembers the time Schlumberger was falling and Lovoi told him to "load up the boat with Schlumberger." The excitable Cramer warned Lovoi that "if this boat sinks I am going to come over to your house and make your life miserable." He didn't have to: Cramer ended up scoring a 100% gain with the options he bought that day.

BANKING: Diane Merdian, Montgomery Securities

There's no criticism that angers analysts more than the charge that their research is colored by investment banking considerations. No one can say that of Merdian. Last January, she lowered her rating on Wells Fargo, a Montgomery client, just before the stock peaked and then began to slide. "It takes a lot of guts to do that," says one grateful money manager. "I'm sure people at Wells Fargo weren't happy."

SOFTWARE: Michael Stanek, Lehman Brothers

Stanek isn't yet the ax on industry leader Microsoft--that honor belongs to Rick Sherlund of Goldman Sachs. But keep your eye on this 33-year-old. Case in point: He urged clients to stick with MSFT when it was treading water last spring at $100 a share. Now it's at $135. "I kept people in," says Stanek, "and they made their bonuses because of this stock."

--Nelson D. Schwartz