Institutional Investor magazine's All-America analyst rankings usually reward Wall Street pros who picked winners, but 2008's crop—especially in the financial businesses—is populated with those who were best at finding the losers in the lot.

Exhibit No.1: Sanford Bernstein's Brad Hintz, who topped the list among those watching brokers and asset managers. He jumped from third place (where he had spent the past five years) into first because he put a buy rating on just one stock, Charles Schwab. Its shares climbed 26.5 percent as the firms like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers disappeared and others were pushed to the brink.

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Exhibit No.2: Mike Mayo of Deutsche Bank, who downgraded Citigroup to a sell in October 2007—when it was trading at $45—three weeks before the board blew out chairman and C.E.O. Chuck Prince. He finished third on the large-cap-banks team. Meredith Whitney, the comely Doyenne of Doom, was a mere runner-up, according to the 3,000 or so financial pros Institutional Investor consulted for its survey.

But, possibly proving Portfolio.com's Megan Barnett's point that the financial stocks can no longer be analyzed, showing that even the best may have been snoozing a bit, several of the winners saw no big issues with financial giants that ended up out of business or bailed out by the government.

First Team consumer-finance analyst Bruce Harting had Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac overweighted in his portfolio until the companies were seized by the government. Then again, he worked for the Lehman-That-Is-No-More.

Another Bernstein pro, Todd Bault will get a nice head shot in the magazine as the top insurance/nonlife analyst, but he'll also have to live down an infamous call: In mid-August 2008, he said derivatives-crazed A.I.G.’s losses were "completely manageable versus their book value." That'll be reassuring to Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, who now essentially owns A.I.G. after the government agreed to a bailout that has grown to more than $120 billion.