Yes but did you have fun doing it
I believe most of the other previous studies of market analysts were done on major world indices, so its comforting to know that our analysts aren't any worse lol.
Quote Originally Posted by BlackPeter View Post
Just in case anybody is wondering why I didn't continue with this analysis for March ...

Well, while it looks like so far that the analyst predictions are pretty random anyway ... no analyst I am aware of could predict this virus in March 2019, i.e. it would be pretty meaningless for the current bear / high volatility phase to check their one year old stock price forecasts against what really happened during this "black swan event".

I might continue this analysis starting again in April 2021 (and comparing forecasts against April 2020 numbers).

For what it is worth ... I looked so far into 20 companies (with forecasts made in January and February 2019) vs outcomes in January and February 2020.

Instead of just using my (obviously quite arbitrary) pass / fail criteria as per the top post - here is a scatter graph showing the forecasted SP change vs the observed SP change.

Scattergraph analystpredictions.JPG

As we can see: 20 consensus predictions, 5 of them too optimistic (forecasted consensus 10% or more above achieved SP), 4 of them "realistic (consensus matched target +/-10%), and 11 too pessimistic (target more than 10% above consensus).

Slightly surprising, since we always seem to think that analysts are too optimistic, but they probably just didn't expect the last bull to run as far as it did.

Whatever it is - based on above analysis it appears that throwing darts while being blindfolded might be an absolutely adequate method compared to using analyst consensus to determine where share prices for individual stocks will go.