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Comment by darth_avocado | Hacker News Reader

Wall Street “analysts” are as right about the market as a coin flip. Downgrading a price target from $30 to $28 when the stock has trended from $20 to $15 in the last 12 months or raising the target from $450 to $500 when the stock price grew from $300 to $320. They’re not even remotely right on most things and are lagging indicators when they right.

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Nassim Taleb has statistically proven that there is only a handful of investors ever who's returns over the market average can't be explained by random noise.

That doesn't prove there is no such thing as "talent" wrt investments, but it is proof there is almost no proof anyone has "talent".

If they did significantly better than random chance, they should be able to use that to become filthy rich in fairly short order, and you’d only be hearing their advice because they publish it as a hobby in between yachting. I don’t think there are any analysts like that.

> If they did significantly better than random chance, they should be able to use that to become filthy rich

To be fair, this is many analysts’ ambitions. Use the role to build contacts and a public track record. Then go out and raise a fund.

> Wall Street “analysts” are as right about the market as a coin flip

Source? (Not doubting. Just haven’t looked at this for a while.)

There are plenty of sites that track analyst performance, some paid others not.

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