Analyst Rating

Investment banks and research firms employ analysts who cover a handful of companies each, read the filings, sit on the earnings calls, and publish a view. That view gets compressed into one word so it can be listed in a table. Different firms use different words for the same idea, so Overweight, Outperform, and Buy often mean roughly the same thing.

The ratings are worth understanding as evidence about what professional opinion currently is, not as instructions. They are also lopsided by construction: across the market, positive ratings vastly outnumber negative ones, partly because a firm that publishes a Sell rating on a company can find it harder to get that company's management on the phone afterwards.

ConvictionStocks reports the counts and stops there. On a company page you will see how many analysts landed in each bucket, without a verdict of our own layered on top, because the count is a fact and the verdict would be advice.