This paper examines whether sell-side security analysts follow momentum or create momentum by themselves for recommending stocks. We employ an indirect method of testing the role of analysts by assigning projected recommendation scores for the neglected stocks to mitigate the so-called...

Besides the positively biased rating structure and procyclical nature of analysts' stock recommendations we observe that within the global universe stock recommendations and stock performance are largely uncorrelated. Nevertheless, investors are able to benefit from sell side stock...

Researchers have struggled to find rational risk factors that explain momentum profits derived from buying prior winners and shorting prior losers. Behavioral explanations have been offered that focus on tendencies of investors to underreact to news and recommendations. Our study provides an...

Overconfident CEOs are known to overestimate their ability to generate returns, overpay for target firms, and take excessive risks. We find a CEO's overconfidence can also indirectly affect other market participants, specifically analysts who issue earnings forecasts. First, firms with...

We address whether analysts bias earnings forecast revisions and convey the bias using forecast revision consistency, i.e., the extent to which analyst reports with earnings forecast revisions include stock recommendation and target price revisions consistent in sign with the earnings forecast...

We study the information content of options trading volume for future stock returns predictability around analysts’ recommendation announcements. We exploit the directionality of the options trading volume measure from the ISE database to examine which category of options trading volume is...

This paper presents an online-experiment on overconfidence in the context of financial markets. Our subject pool consists of institutional investors, investment advisors and individual investors, all of them being registered users of a large online platform for market sentiment data. Due to...

Existing empirical evidence is inconclusive on whether professional investors show sophisticated behavior or not, a question which is at the heart of market efficiency. This ambiguous evidence is mostly based on trading data or laboratory evidence, which each has its limitations. We complement...

This paper examines financial professionals' overconfidence in their forecasting performance. We are the first to compare individual financial professionals' self-ratings with their true forecasting performance. Data spans several years at monthly frequency. The forecasters in our sample do not...

Dividend discount model (DDM) is the simplest model for valuing equities in finance. Many analysts belived that DDM is outmoded, but much of the intuition that drives Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) valuation is embedded in the DDM model. There are also specific companies stocks where the DDM model...