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Should you trust Wall Street analysts?

The answer to the question ‘should you trust Wall Street analyst ratings?’ is simple: it depends who you trust. Following top analysts can help you generate higher returns.

But whether you are a new or experienced investor, chances are you face the conundrum of finding a reliable financial source for stock recommendations. And as more firms and analysts enter the playing field, finding a trustworthy analyst ratings becomes even more challenging. That’s where TipRanks comes in.

Historical performance matters when choosing stock pickers

An academic study published in the Journal of Financial Economics (“Do security analysts exhibit persistent differences in stock picking ability?” by Michael B. Mikhail; Beverly R. Walther; and Richard H. Willis) highlights just why financial accountability i.e. holding analysts accountable to their stock recommendations, is so crucial for investor out-performance.

“We find that analysts whose recommendation revisions earned the most excess returns in the past continue to outperform in the future” say the study’s authors.

This finding holds true regardless of whether performance was measured over the past one, three or five years.

Interestingly the study also finds that the reverse is true: analysts who score the least returns tend to underperform in the future.

top analyst ratingsAnd this isn’t just a marginal difference- “excess returns in the one and three trading months following the revision are significant”.

The authors leave investors with the following advice: “historical performance matters when choosing stock pickers” and the longer the analyst’s winning streak, the better.

How to easily find the Street’s top analysts using TipRanks

With this in mind, the obvious question for investors is “How to find these best-performing analysts- and their stock recommendations?

Most of the time, investors have nothing more to go on than the name of the analyst’s firm or the way in which the analyst makes his recommendation. But both these factors are unreliable measures of success.

TipRanks offers a clear solution. This isn’t surprising given that the company was founded with the exact purpose of holding financial experts accountable to their stock recommendations- and bringing hedge fund capability to individual investors.

Using Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms, TipRanks tracks and ranks recommendations from over 4,700 Wall Street analysts. This financial accountability engine uses three key factors to measure analyst performance, namely success rate, average return and statistical significance of their stock recommendations.

The result: investors can pinpoint the latest stock recommendations from the Top 25 Analysts with the most profitable track records and the sharpest stock picking ability.

Across all sectors, the current no. 1 analyst is Canaccord Genuity’s tech analyst Richard Davis (Profile & Recommendations). Measured on a 1-year basis he scores a very impressive 81% success rate and 34.4% average return. This is across his 380 stock recommendations.

Delving deeper into top analyst ratings

Clicking on Davis’ profile reveals all his stock ratings over the last six years. For example, we can see that Davis has just issued a bullish buy rating on Australian enterprise software company Atlassian Corp Plc (NASDAQ:TEAM). This comes with an $85 price target (16% upside potential from the current share price). On TEAM specifically, Davis has a very strong track record, as can see from this screenshot here. Bear in mind this is also measured on a 1-year basis:

This gives us reassurance that Davis’ bets are on the money when it comes to TEAM stock. You can carry out the same analysis for every single analyst rating. Just click on the ticker in the analyst profile.

Which stocks are Wall Street’s best analysts recommending right now? Find out here<<

Harriet Lefton
Harriet Lefton, originally from the UK, began her career as a journalist specialising in the niche world of metal markets. She graduated from the University of Cambridge before becoming a qualified UK lawyer. Now she has turned her attention to the world of financial blogging, covering US stocks, analysts and all manner of things finance-related.

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