Scratching My Data Itch: Analysts at Earnings Calls

Recently I had a data itch to find out generally how many analysts attend an earnings conference call? What does the distribution looks like? Which are the stocks that have the most analysts covering them?

Thanks to Seeking Alpha's transcripts on the open web, the data was out there and just needed to be aggregated.

I checked some 15k conference call transcripts from Seeking Alpha from June 30th 2009 to some time in 2007 and aggregated the number of analysts attending each of the earnings conference calls. Following is what the distribution looks like:

The big fat belly of the curve is at roughly 7 analysts in a conference call. I am pretty sure there is some dependency on the number of analysts to institutional interest in the stock, and also the market cap, and it would be interesting to normalize by that.

But even in this raw data there are a few companies which have more than 18-20 analysts listening in.

Here is a list of call transcripts in last few months that have an unusually high number of analysts.

Transcripts	Number of Analysts:
Urban Outfitters, Inc. (URBN)	25
NetApp, Inc. (NTAP)	23
Broadcom Corporation (BRCM)	22
Abercrombie & Fitch Co. (ANF)	21
Macy’s, Inc. (M)	21
McDonald's Corporation (MCD)	21
MEMC Electronic Materials Inc. (WFR)	21
P.F. Chang’s China Bistro (PFCB)	21
Aeropostale Inc. (ARO)	20
Broadcom Corporation (BRCM)	20
D.R. Horton Inc. (DHI	20
Delta Air Lines, Inc. (DAL)	20
The Boeing Company (BA)	20
Baidu, Inc. (BIDU)	19
Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc. (CNI)	19
McDonalds Corp. (MCD)	19
Texas Instrument (TXN)	19
Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO)	19
American Capital Ltd. (ACAS)	18
Endo Pharmaceuticals Holdings Inc. (ENDP)	18
Google Inc. (GOOG)	18
Google Inc. (GOOG)	18
Quicksilver Resources Inc. (KWK)	18
Stryker Corp. (SYK)	18
The Boeing Company (BA)	18
Abercrombie & Fitch Co. (ANF)	17

I don't know the correlation of future stock performance to how many analysts are listening in or to the delta of number of analysts from the last call. I would love to hear what you think.

Disclosure: Long GOOG

Comments

[henryl:]

Very interesting view behind the scenes. But, as they say in academia, It begs a little more research. Please keep up the good work.

Jul 30 10:13 AM

[MILESCFA:]

I hate to tell you this but I strongly suspect your time was wasted. The curve looks "normal" to me (when you're bounded by zero on the downside). Further, I'm 95 or 98.6% sure the correlation to the number of analysts following the stock would be close to 1. There should also be a high correlation to the stock's market cap. Both of the two factors I mention are monitored by "quants" and can be a factor in stock performance (ie, "neglect" and "small cap")...

but will you're study help you pick winning stocks? No, not really.

Jul 30 03:23 PM