Article Shows That Sell Side Analysts Still Suck

An article entitled "Behavioural Bias and Conflicts of Interest in Analyst Stock Recommendations" published in the Journal of Business Finance & Accounting examines these issues:

"Whether sell-side analysts are prone to behavioural errors when making stock recommendations as well as the impact of investment banking relationships on their judgments. In particular, we analyse their report narratives for evidence of cognitive bias."

The conclusions:

"New buy recommendations on average have no investment value."

I think everyone already knew that, although I would add that in the short term they can drive the price of a stock up.

"Whereas new sell recommendations do, and take time to be assimilated by the market."

Again, fairly logical since sell side sell recommendations are fairly rare, they are likely to be more noticed.

"We also show that new buy recommendations are distinguished from new sells both by the level of analyst optimism and representativeness bias as well as with increased conflicts of interest."

Just as a review, representativeness bias refers to "A cognitive strategy for quickly estimating the probability that a given instance is a member of a particular category. We use it to judge the likelihood that something or someone belongs to a specific category."

"Successful new buy recommendations are characterised by lower prior returns, value stock status, smaller firms and weaker investment banking relationships."

Small Cap Value stocks with little or no analyst coverage rule.

So what does this all prove? That sell side analysts are humans just like the rest of us and suffer from deviant investment behavior despite what is arguably a higher formal education.

Mokoaleli-Mokoteli, Thabang, Taffler, Richard J. and Agarwal, Vineet,Behavioural Bias and Conflicts of Interest in Analyst Stock Recommendations. Journal of Business Finance & Accounting, Vol. 36, Nos. 3-4, pp. 384-418, April/May 2009. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1400370 or DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-5957.2009.02125.x