Somewhere Elaine Garzarelli is nodding her head.  The woman who as a stock analyst at Shearson Lehman famously “predicted” the Black Monday market crash of 1987 is thinking, “Finally I’m not alone.”

Meredith Whitney’s Garzarelli-esque moment was in 2007 when she famously “predicted” the troubles at Citi.  Since then she’s gone on to be horribly, horribly wrong about muni bonds and lose half of the clients at the research firm she founded on the back of her “prescient insight” into markets.

Elaine Garzarelli went on to found Garzarelli Capital.  Running a play from that same playbook Meredith Whitney recently announced she’s getting out of the research game in favor of managing other people’s money.

An interesting side note to the story is that for all of Meredith Whitney’s brilliance she estimates (per a recent interview withBloombergBusinessweek) that, “I think I lost between a quarter and a half a million dollars on financial positions.  I rode Lehman all the way down to zero.  It’s pretty ironic, right?  That, I don’t think anyone knows.”

The lesson here is not about being gun-shy.  There’s nothing wrong with having an opinion and conviction.  Instead the lesson is ours to learn for the next time some “expert” says something and we think we need to act upon it.