NEC Stock Price Dips After Brokerage Recommendation : Trading: Raymond James & Associates reverses long-term buy advice, suggests clients should sell shares.

The stock price of National Education Corp. plunged after a stock brokerage changed its recommendation from a long-term buy to sell.

Raymond James & Associates, a brokerage in St. Petersburg, Fla., reversed a recommendation from last year and suggested its clients sell the stock. NEC stock closed Monday at $5.37, down $1.37 in New York Stock Exchange trading.

The recommendation came on the heels of an NEC financial report last week that said the company was still having trouble in its training division, the only unprofitable one of NEC’s four divisions.

Net income of the company was $3.5 million, an 8% increase over $3.3 million in the third quarter last year. It came on revenue of $94.3 million, off 3% from $97.4 million last year.

The financial report said that if the losses in the training group continue, earnings for the year will be at or below last year’s level. “The stock market is not very forgiving right now,” NEC General Counsel Jeffrey Brill said Monday.

The training group has been hardest hit by the recession, he said, since it involves providing advanced computer training to workers in major corporations. It was one area where companies started trimming costs when the downturn struck.

But the other divisions are relatively protected, Brill said. The Steck-Vaughn Publishing group provides soft-cover workbooks to schools; the International Correspondence Schools division has a ready demand for its courses from displaced workers, both in the United States and abroad; or workers can go directly to the company’s 50 National Education Centers for job training.

“The training division has been the focus of attention over the last two years,” he said. But it is “the only one of the four that is having trouble.”