Who are the analysts and who becomes a "top" analyst?

WallStreetZen tracks historical analyst recommendations and identifies top-performing analysts, so you can get stock ideas and forecasts from proven performers.

We rank nearly 4,000 sell-side analysts based on average return, win rate, and frequency of picks.

Who are the analysts?

These "sell-side" analysts work at investment banks and brokerage houses.

These equity analysts work full-time to publish stock recommendations based their team's analysis and models.

Investment banks and brokerages hire these analysts to give their clients the most timely and accurate information about stocks in an industry. If this is done well, the analyst's firm will attract more clients and generate more revenue.

Which analysts become "top analysts"?

WallStreetZen partners with a leading global financial data provider to collect analyst recommendations and price targets.

We use this data to track analysts' historical performance - when they say "buy", how often are they right and how much did their recommendations return or lose?

We then rank them based on this performance using our own algorithm (you can learn more about that here), and the top 25% of these analysts qualify as "top" analysts.

WallStreetZen isn't the only place to track Wall Street analyst recommendations, but we do it differently - we do it the right way.

The problem with analyst stock ratings

The problem with analyst stock ratings is we don’t know which ratings to pay attention to and which ones to ignore.

This is what a typical analyst stock recommendation looks like:

Should we be buying NTRA?

Who is Kyle Mikson?

We either blindly follow the recommendation or we ignore it, right?

Not anymore.

Why WallStreetZen built Top Analysts

WallStreetZen shows you analysts' performance data so you don't have to blindly follow or ignore analyst buy, sell, hold recommendations.

A lot of tools may give you access to analyst ratings but, without the accompanying performance data, what good are those ratings?

And if you come across an analyst rating on another site, you can search for how that analyst has been performing:

And if you happen to see a stock recommendation from Kyle Mikson, I’d probably do the opposite (sorry Kyle!).