Sell-side Analysts Research Articles

Analysts’ Institutional Client Catering and Reputation Tradeoff: Strategic Timing of Recommendations

We examine whether sell-side analysts strategically time their favorable recommendations to cater to institutional investors while preserving analysts’ reputational capital. Although prior literature documents that analysts provide more positive recommendations for stocks that are part of their institutional clients’ (specifically, mutual funds’) portfolios, it does not explicitly address a reputation cost associated with such practice. Using a sample of analysts’ recommendations on U.S. firms for the 2002–2017 period, we document a pattern of analysts’ recommendations being more optimistic in the end month of a quarter and less optimistic in the beginning month of a quarter. This timing pattern ties to quarterly reporting periods of portfolio managers, with actively managed mutual funds’ holdings being affected the most. Analysts with Institutional Investor All-Star ranking do not engage in such stock recommendation timing practices. The market participants seem to believe rosy recommendations issued for stocks with more institutional holdings in the end month of a quarter with more positive cumulative abnormal returns to upgrade and downgrade recommendations. JEL classifications: G14, G24

Managerial ability and analysts’ stock recommendations

This study examines whether analysts consider managerial ability in forming their stock recommendations and, if so, whether it improves the quality of their recommendations. We find that sell-side analysts recommend firms with higher managerial ability more favorably, suggesting that analysts value the implications of managerial ability in assessing firm value. Moreover, the profitability of analyst recommendations increases when the recommendation takes managerial ability into account. Overall, our results suggest that managerial ability is a distinct and important attribute of firms in explaining analysts’ stock recommendations and the value of those recommendations to investors.

Sports Mood Index and sell-side analysts

This paper explores how sports-induced bad mood affects the sentiment and behavior of sell-side financial analysts. I construct the Sports Mood Index (SMI) of metropolitan areas in the U.S. based on the performance of Big 4 professional sports teams. In sports-induced bad mood settings, sell-side analysts tend to issue more pessimistic forecasts in both earnings forecast and price target samples. Sports-induced bad mood also leads to inattention, associated with larger forecast errors, and analysts are slower or less likely to respond to earnings announcements. The results are robust to various measurements of pessimism, forecast errors and activity levels.

Investor relations activities and insider trading: Evidence from China

This paper examines the impact of investor relations (IR) activities involving different market participants on the listed firms’ insiders’ information acquisition and informed trading behavior. Using IR activities data of SZSE-listed firms from July 2012 to December 2021, we find that it seems that IR activities with insider trading have higher information content, especially those involving the participation of sell-side analysts or mutual fund managers. By properly timing trades according to their foreknowledge of these activities, insiders can significantly improve their returns. Our results highlight that the sell-side analysts and mutual fund managers play the crucial roles in facilitating insiders’ informed trading.

Temperature shocks and industry earnings news

Climate scientists project rising average temperatures and increasing frequency of temperature extremes. We study how extreme temperatures affect corporate profitability across different industries and whether sell-side analysts understand these relationships. We combine granular daily data on temperatures across the continental U.S. with locations of public companies’ establishments and build a panel of quarterly firm-level temperature exposures. Extreme temperatures significantly impact earnings in over 40% of industries, with bi-directional effects that harm some industries while others benefit. Analysts and investors do not immediately react to observable intra-quarter temperature shocks, though earnings forecasts account for temperature effects by quarter-end in many industries.

Business Group Analysts

We exploit the rich data of business groups in China and identify sell-side analysts following multiple listed firms within a business group (BG analysts). For a group firm, we find that BG analysts issue more accurate forecasts than non-BG analysts. Such an effect is more pronounced when the focal firm shares stronger economic links with, and when its covering analysts have greater information demand for, its group peers. Further analyses suggest evidence of intragroup information flows. Around group peers’ annual earnings announcements, BG analysts are more likely than non-BG analysts to revise their forecasts for the focal firm along the same direction as group peers’ earnings surprises. Confined to analysts’ coverage initiations for a group firm, those who have covered the focal firm’s group peers prior to the coverage initiation show superior forecasting performance during the initiation year. By adopting the unique perspective of business groups, i.e., a prevalent organizational structure, our study shows that information commonalities within a business group shape analyst behaviour.

Do Hedge Funds Value Sell-Side Analysts Differently?

Do Hedge Funds Value Sell-Side Analysts Differently?

Does lowball guidance work? An analysis of firms that consistently beat their guidance by large margins

Lowball guidance is the practice of firm managers issuing overly cautious guidance that is later exceeded by a large margin upon earnings announcement. In this study, we examine this practice at the episode level, where a firm engages in it over multiple consecutive quarters. Using a control sample of firms that exhibited episodes of meet or small beats, we draw inferences specific to lowball guidance episodes. We assess their prevalence in a broad sample of firms and provide evidence related to two explanations of lowball guidance episodes: firms' earnings uncertainty, and to a lesser extent, firms’ attempt to appease sell-side analysts and institutional investors. Stock return tests suggest that there are short-term capital market benefits to lowball guidance episodes, but the benefits dissipate eventually. Our results indicate that episodes of lowball guidance likely appeal to certain types of market participants in the short term, but they are not sustainable.

MiFID II unbundling and sell-side analyst research

We examine broad effects of MiFID II, which mandated unbundled pricing of analyst research in the European Union beginning in 2018. We find significant reductions in sell-side analyst following, particularly for firms for which the marginal analyst was less important (larger, older, less volatile firms with greater coverage and more accurate forecasts). High quality analysts (more accurate, experienced, and in positions of seniority) were more likely to leave the sell-side and move to the buy-side, while remaining sell-side analysts increased efforts to make their forecasts more informative (more accurate, more detailed, and more likely to include informative recommendations resulting in larger stock price responses). Firms responded to a loss of sell-side coverage with more frequent, forward-looking, and informative investor relations events, especially for firms that lost the most coverage. Our results support recent theoretical analysis predicting that unbundling had significant implications for sell-side research, buy-side research, and firm responses.

Retail trading and analyst coverage

How does retail trading impact information supply in financial markets? We build a trading model with endogenous information supply where analysts maximize trading volume by institutional investors. In equilibrium, sell-side analysts provide higher quality signals in stocks with large retail interest, as institutional investors can trade more aggressively without revealing information. We provide empirical evidence supporting the main prediction of the model: A one standard deviation increase in retail trading leads to an additional 0.6 analysts covering the stock. To establish causality, we confirm our results using stock splits as a plausibly exogenous shock to retail trading.

The great sell-side sell-off: evidence of declining financial analyst coverage

PurposeMotivated by significant global developments affecting the sell-side industry, in particular a shift toward passive investments and growing regulation, this study examines whether financial analyst coverage declined over the past decade and if any loss of analyst coverage is associated with a change in forecast accuracy.Design/methodology/approachAfter investigating, and confirming, a general decline in analyst following, the authors calculate the loss of analyst coverage relative to the firm-specific maximum between 2009 and 2013. In multivariate analyses, the authors then examine whether this loss of coverage differs across geographic region, firm size and capital market development, and whether it is associated with consensus analyst accuracy.FindingsResults indicate that between 2011 and 2021, firm-specific analyst coverage globally declined 17.8%, while the decline in the EU was an even greater, 28.5%. Within the EU, results are most pronounced for small-cap firms. As a consequence of the loss of coverage, the authors observe a global decline in forecast accuracy, with EU small-cap firms and firms domiciled in EU non-developed capital markets faring the worst.Originality/valueThis study is the first to document a concerning global decline in analyst coverage over the past decade. The study results provide broad-based empirical support for anecdotal reports that smaller firms in the EU and those in EU non-developed capital markets bear the brunt of consequences stemming from changes in the sell-side analyst industry.

Uncovering the information content in abnormal institutional visits

We uncover the information contained in institutional investors’ collective corporate visit behaviors, which is incremental to their private information privileges. Abnormal institutional visit (AIV) significantly predicts cross-sectional stock returns in a positive direction, consistent with the hypothesis that given short-sale constraints and limited resources, institutions systematically allocate more visit efforts to firms that they deem to have promising prospects. Moreover, such information is yet not effectively reflected in analyst forecasts until firms officially announce the earnings, suggesting limitations in the role played by sell-side analysts as intermediaries to convey information to the market.

Flattering or Really Understanding? Research on Stock Recommendations by Sell-Side Analysts in China

This article investigates whether the business relationships between brokerage firms and listed companies influence sell-side analysts’ stock recommendation ratings. Using the recommendation data of A-share listed companies disclosed by China’s domestic brokerage firms from 2004 to 2019, this article finds that sell-side analysts of brokerage firms that have securities underwriting relationships with listed companies are inclined to give those companies investment evaluations that are more-positive than evaluations from non-affiliated analysts. After a series of robustness tests and alleviating endogenous problems, such as the self-selection of underwriting relationships and of the sell-side analysts’ coverage samples, the empirical result remains unchanged. Using an event study method to compare differences in the cumulative abnormal returns of stocks during the event window of the recommendation releases, the authors find that it is information advantage rather than collusion of interests that leads affiliated sell-side analysts to issue more aggressive investment recommendations. Further research shows that “client pressure” will enhance the investment rating enthusiasm of analysts of related brokerage firms, whereas “peer pressure” will not weaken the investment rating enthusiasm of them, thus verifying the robustness of causality. The findings in this article enlighten the regulatory authorities and the capital market about the characteristics of stock recommendations of related brokerage firms’ analysts and the motives behind these recommendations, which is of great significance in protecting the interests of investors.

The Value of Eliciting Information: Evidence from Sell-Side Analysts

ABSTRACT The ability to elicit information is a critical skill that many analysts and other information agents strive to master. This paper develops and validates a novel approach to measure analysts’ skill in eliciting information and studies its relation with analysts’ performance. The results suggest that analysts who are skilled in eliciting information issue more accurate forecasts and more informative stock recommendations. Further, skilled analysts’ recommendations are incrementally more informative for companies with more opaque information environments and with managers who may be delaying bad news. Finally, analysts skilled in eliciting information are more likely to be cited by journalists, recognized by the profession (Institutional Investor all-star status), and less likely to be demoted. These findings demonstrate the importance of elicitation as a distinct skill that influences analysts’ output quality, thereby extending previous research that generally focuses on the performance effects of general analyst characteristics rather than specific skills. Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text. JEL Classifications: M41; G11; G14.

What Triggers Corporate Site Visits, and Do Investors Care? A Comparison of Buy-Side and Sell-Side Analyst Site Visits in China

Taking advantage of a recently established dataset that records financial analysts’ firm visits, this study examines the factors that determine the number of buy-side and sell-side analyst firm visits in a given year and how investors respond to these visits. Both buy-side and sell-side analysts seem motivated to visit firms when they are considering buying or recommending that investors buy shares rather than when they are considering selling or when they are recommending that investors sell shares. However, there are still significant differences in the firms that buy-side and sell-side analysts choose to visit. Using a binomial count model, this study shows that buy-side analyst firm visits are heavily focused on industry leaders—firms with a high share of the total revenue in their given industry—while sell-side analyst firm visits are not. By looking at the response of investors to buy-side or sell-side analyst firm visits, a regression analysis uncovers evidence that investors trust buy-side analysts, responding to firm visits by buy-side analysts by purchasing more shares in the firm. Investors do not have the same level of confidence in sell-side analysts. Investors respond to firm visits by sell-side analysts by selling more shares in the firm. This phenomenon is even more significant for firms that are outperforming the market. The results suggest that there is a significant cost to the conflict of interest inherent in sell-side analysts’ research. These costs increase when analysts recommend outperforming firms to the public.

The Promise and Peril of Generative AI: Evidence from ChatGPT as Sell-Side Analysts

The Promise and Peril of Generative AI: Evidence from ChatGPT as Sell-Side Analysts

How Do Sell-Side Analysts Allocate Attention in China's Stock Market?

How Do Sell-Side Analysts Allocate Attention in China's Stock Market?

Symbolic self-completion: The case of sell-side analysts

Symbolic self-completion: The case of sell-side analysts

‘Did You Catch the Game Last Night?’ Peer Group Effects in Sell-Side Analyst Forecasts

‘Did You Catch the Game Last Night?’ Peer Group Effects in Sell-Side Analyst Forecasts

Executive Narcissism and the Power of Persuasion: Evidence from the Laboratory and Sell-Side Analyst Valuations

Executive Narcissism and the Power of Persuasion: Evidence from the Laboratory and Sell-Side Analyst Valuations