Why Analysts Miss Targets?
April 15, 2014 - Investing Expertise
Do professional analysts systematically miss target prices for individual stocks? In the November 2013 draft of their paper entitled “Understanding and Predicting Target Price Valuation Errors”, Patricia Dechow and Haifeng You measure the errors in returns implied by professional stock analyst consensus price targets and examine the sources of these errors. They further investigate whether investors can anticipate and exploit consensus target price errors. They construct consensus target prices at the end of each month as the simple average of the most recent target price forecasts issued by following analysts within the last 90 days. Using analyst stock price targets, actual monthly returns and trading volumes, firm accounting data and institutional ownership data spanning April 1999 through December 2011 (227,127 firm-month observations), they find that: Keep Reading