He can afford college?

In seriousness though: are analysts allowed to have an interest in stocks they're publishing analysis for? It seems like a fine line between creating an obvious conflict of interest (see: TFA perhaps on a more subtle level) and wanting them to have skin in the game so they're incentivized to provide useful analysis (rather than YOLO: stock goes up/down and I don't care because it's other people's money on the line).

In general, it seems like a hard problem to compensate an analyst without either creating one of the above scenarios or generally setting up a scenario where they'd be better off trading for themselves on the basis of their analysis rather than providing a service to other investors.