Handeln Aktienanalysten rational?

Studienarbeit aus dem Jahr 2004 im Fachbereich BWL - Bank, Börse, Versicherung, Note: 1,7, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (Seminar für Kapitalmarktforschung und Finanzierung), Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: Equity analysts play a crucial role in modern financial markets by aggregating information about listed firms and issuing earnings forecasts as well as investment recommendations for these firms. As equity analysts mostly work for well-known financial institutions, their forecasts and recommendations are widely regarded as authoritative. Many institutional and private investors rely heavily on the broker reports issued by equity analysts when making their investment decisions.

This confidence in equity analysts is highly dependent on the assumption that these individuals act rationally - i.e., that their forecasts and recommendations do not suffer systematic biases. Unfortunately, however, there is a great deal of scientific evidence that analyst opinions do indeed suffer from a number of systematic biases, distorting their earnings forecasts and investment recommendations. Some of these biases lead analysts to be too optimistic: for instance, they may gain privileged access to a firm's senior management and thus to superior sources for information if they are generally regarded to hold favorable views about that firm. On the other hand, there is also evidence for pessimistic biases: for instance, a firm's senior management might engage in conscious efforts to make analysts underestimate quarterly earnings, so that actual earnings do eventually "beat" analyst forecasts.

This work resumes the findings of a large body of scientific literature, building in large part on Behavioral Finance theory, on the rationality of equity analysts. It discusses a number of mechanisms that have been found to trigger both optimistic and pessimistic biases. In addition, the profession of the equity analyst and its complex stakeholder relationships are discussed. Finally, individual rationality of equity analysts is debated from a ethical-philosophical perspective, revealing that a Habermasian approach can help greatly to explain behaviors discovered by traditional Finance theory.