Abstract

It is a well documented phenomenon that stock prices underreact to news about future earnings and drift in the direction suggested by revisions in analysts' earnings forecasts. This paper shows that the dispersion in analysts' consensus forecasts contains incremental information to predict future stock returns. Higher abnormal returns can be achieved by applying an earnings momentum strategy to stocks with a low dispersion. This finding supports one of the recent behavioral models in which investors focus too little on the weight of new evidence and conservatively update their beliefs in the right direction, but by too little in magnitude with respect to more objective information.

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