studying public records and filings by the company, as well as by participating in public earnings calls where they can ask direct questions to the management. Additional information can be also received in small group or one-on-one meetings with senior members of management teams. However, in many markets such information gathering became difficult and potentially illegal due to legislative changes brought upon by corporate scandals in the early 2000s. One example is Regulation FD (Fair Disclosure) in the United States. Many other developed countries also adopted similar rules. Analyst performance is ranked by a range of services such as StarMine owned by Thomson Reuters or Institutional Investor magazine. Research by Numis found that small companies with the most analyst coverage outperformed peers by 2.5 per cent — while those with low coverage underperformed by 0.7 per cent. Controversies about financing Analyst recommendations on stocks owned by firms employing them may be seen as potentially biased. Debate still exists about the way sell-side analysts are paid. Usually brokerage fees pay for their research. But this creates a temptation for analysts to act as stock sellers and to lure investors into "overtrading". Some consider that it would be sounder if investors had to pay for financial research separately and directly to fully independent research firms. The research department sometimes doesn't have the ability to bring in enough money to be a self-sustaining research company. The research analysts' department is therefore sometimes part of the marketing department of an investment bank, brokerage, or investment advisory firm. Since 2002 there has been extra effort to overcome perceived conflicts of interest between the investment part of the firm and the public and client research part of the firm (see accounting scandals). For example, research firms are sometimes separated into two categories, brokerage and independent. Independent researchers are not part of an investment firm and so don't have the same incentive to issue overly favorable views on companies. But this might not be sufficient to avoid all conflicts of interest. In Europe, the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive 2004 and subsequent related legislation has in part been an attempt to clarify the exact remit of equity analysts. A recent development is the introduction of "MiFID 2" (Directive 2014/65/EU), a legal framework for securities markets, investment intermediaries, and trading venues. Particularly, here, the way that research may be sold is regulated; see § Substance there, and .