Analysts are the detectives of the financial world. They are professionals who scrutinize companies, industries, and economic trends to evaluate investment opportunities, primarily stocks and bonds. Working in what's known as equity research, their job is to dig deep into a company's financial health, competitive position, and management quality. They build complex financial models to forecast future earnings and cash flows, ultimately arriving at an estimate of a company's intrinsic value. This analysis is then condensed into research reports, which typically include a recommendation—the famous “Buy,” “Sell,” or “Hold” ratings—and a price target, which is the price they expect the stock to reach within a certain timeframe, usually 12 months. Their opinions can significantly sway market sentiment and stock prices, making them influential, and sometimes controversial, figures in the investment landscape.
Not all analysts are created equal, and they generally fall into two camps, colloquially known as the “sell-side” and the “buy-side.” Understanding the difference is key to knowing whose interests they represent.
These are the analysts most investors are familiar with. They work for investment banks and brokerage firms (the “sell-side” of Wall Street, which sells stocks, bonds, and financial services). Their research reports are used to advise the firm's clients and are often widely distributed to the public to generate trading business. The primary role of a sell-side analyst is to provide compelling investment ideas to clients. However, a significant conflict of interest can arise. The companies these analysts cover are often the same companies their investment bank wants to win business from (e.g., for mergers or raising capital). This can create subtle pressure to maintain positive ratings to avoid damaging valuable corporate relationships.
Buy-side analysts work behind the scenes for institutions that manage large pools of money, such as mutual funds, hedge funds, pension funds, and insurance companies. These institutions are the “buyers” of stocks and other securities. The research produced by buy-side analysts is almost always proprietary and used exclusively by their firm's portfolio managers to make investment decisions. Their one and only goal is to find profitable investments for their fund. Because their firm's own capital is at stake, buy-side analysis is often considered more skeptical, rigorous, and shielded from the public-facing pressures that sell-side analysts face.
Analysts combine investigative skills with financial acumen to form their opinions. Their process typically involves:
The culmination of this work is the research report, which presents their investment thesis and recommendation.
For a value investor, an analyst's report should be treated as a starting point, not a conclusion. While they can be a source of useful data, relying on them uncritically is a recipe for mediocrity, or worse. As Benjamin Graham, the father of value investing, taught, you must be your own analyst.
Analysts are human, and they are susceptible to herding behavior. It is often safer for an analyst's career to be wrong along with the consensus than to be spectacularly wrong while standing alone. This leads to price targets and earnings estimates clustering together, discouraging the independent, contrarian thinking that uncovers truly undervalued opportunities.
The market is often obsessed with quarterly performance, and analysts feed this beast. Their models are typically focused on the next 12-18 months, and their attention is laser-focused on whether a company will beat or miss its next quarterly earnings per share (EPS) estimate. A value investor like Warren Buffett, however, thinks in terms of owning a business for decades, making the obsession with a single quarter's results a distracting noise.
Have you ever noticed how rare a “Sell” rating is? This isn't because every company is a great investment. Sell-side analysts who issue “Sell” ratings risk being cut off from management access and may jeopardize their firm's banking relationships with that company. Consequently, the ratings are heavily skewed toward “Buy” and “Hold.” For many insiders, a “Hold” is simply a polite way of saying “Sell.”
Instead of blindly following their recommendations, use analysts as a resource.