Nick Sargen, chief investment officer at Cincinnati-based Fort Washington Investment Advisors, says analysts will hit their target prices more often when issues like the European debt crisis are resolved and volatility decreases.

"The best analysts will look prescient once the dust settles as people look through the rubble and fundamental factors start to matter again," says Sargen, whose firm manages $38 billion.

Citigroup's 60% accuracy rate stands in contrast to last year's No. 1 firm Goldman Sachs Group Inc., which got 38% of its calls right. This year, Goldman is No. 2, with 25 accurate calls on the 44 financial stocks it follows.

The larger analyst community is wrong much more often than it's right. On average, the 212 firms that are part of the ranking got 1.3 stock recommendations correct out of every 16,  according to Bloomberg data.

Some sell-side analysts are so consistently wrong that Sam Ginzburg of First New York Securities LLC bets against their recommendations. "If an analyst is wrong all the time, I'm going to take the other side of what he's saying," says Ginzburg, who's a partner and head of capital markets at the New York-based proprietary trading firm. "That is just as good to us as if he's typically right."

Guglielmi, who's head of Mediobanca's research department and European banking team, says the downgrade of European banks was considered very bold at the time.

'A Crazy Call'

"It was a crazy call, and it's the one I'm most proud of," says the former Merrill Lynch & Co. analyst, who's been at Mediobanca Securities since 2010. "Top management and regulators were telling us that there were no imminent capital problems. We said, 'Give me capital now or we go to Waterloo together.'"

Guglielmi won his spot among the top 20 analysts with calls on Intesa Sanpaolo SpA, Italy's second-biggest bank by market value, and BNP Paribas SA and Societe Generale SA, France's biggest banks. He went from a "buy" to a "sell" rating on SocGen and from a "neutral" to a "sell" on BNP on July 5. The stocks plunged 43.2% and 32.6% by August 31. He had either a "sell" or "hold" on Intesa after November 10, 2010, and its stock dropped 46.5% from that date to August 31.

Guglielmi still recommends selling the French banks because of their sovereign debt exposure and their leveraged business model. BNP and SocGen were damaged by their exposure to Greek debt and by SocGen's 88% stake in Athens-based Geniki Bank SA.

Italian bank stocks, including Intesa, were downgraded by S&P on September 21, one day after the rating company downgraded Italy's credit rating on concern about its "weakening economic growth." On October 4, Moody's Investors Service also downgraded Italy, saying that weak European growth would make it difficult to reduce the country's 1.9 trillion euros ($2.6 trillion) in debt.

Europe's financial leaders are trying to repair Greece's economy while shoring up euro-zone banks that the International Monetary Fund says face as much as 300 billion euros in credit risk.