We examine the value of expert picks published by SmartMoney, a popular investment periodical. Most can be described as ‘hot' stocks – those that have experienced run-ups in price prior to publication. These stocks subsequently underperform the market by 0.45% per month in the six-month...

I develop a new asset pricing theory that bridges two seemingly unrelated pricing effects from separate literatures: (1) the negative relationship between ex-ante return skewness and expected returns and (2) the negative relationship between dispersion in financial analysts' earnings forecasts...

Previous research finds that stock analysts exhibit both optimistic and pessimistic biases in their earnings forecasts, with the net result being a consistent, but declining, overestimation of forecasted earnings. We extend this research by examining the potential effect of Seasonal Affective...