Vince,
You raised an interesting question regarding the analysists' recommendations, so I studied Dell's performance vs the recommendations over the past year. Needless to say, those who downgraded Dell were wrong and those who upgraded it were right! That was the easy part. But I did notice that only 1 on the list changed their recommendation and that was Piper Jaffray from strong buy 4/2/98 to buy 11/13/98. Kaufman Bros. put out a sell rec. 3/26/98 after the split at $34.25. and 6 mos later, it was 66.00 and split 2:1 again!
Of the 16 recommendations over the past yr., 6 were downgrades, most only one notch down, ie from strong buy to buy, or from buy to hold.
Kaufman Bros. was the only sell. I tried to find a correlation between the stock splits and the change in recommendations, but could not see one that was consistent with each split. In March '98, all 4 rec. were downgrades, but around the Sept. 8 split, all were started with buy or strong buy. Couldn't find anything consistent around earnings either.
So my afternoon was spent confirming what I knew all along...
IGNORE THE ANALYSISTS! (Unless they say "BUY", of course!)
Cheers
KS
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