Yahoo! Finance provides Analyst Opinion data from ThomsonFN and Briefing.com.
Mean Recommendation: There are five different recommendations a broker gives for a stock: Buy, Buy/Hold, Hold, Hold/Sell, and Sell. This caption shows the combined recommendations of all the brokers currently following this stock.
For example, if you see:
Buy 1
Buy/Hold 3
Hold 0
Hold/Sell 1
Sell 0
This means that of the five brokers currently following this stock, one broker is recommending this stock as a Buy, three brokers are recommending this stock as a Buy/Hold, and one broker is recommending this stock as a Hold/Sell.
Average Recommendation: The five recommendations a broker gives to a stock are: Buy, Buy/Hold, Hold, Hold/Sell, and Sell. For ease of understanding, these recommendations are sometimes assigned numbers ranging from 1 to 5. A number "1" represents a "Buy" recommendation, and a number "5" represents a "Sell" Recommendation. Here, the numbers represent the average recommendations of all the brokers following the stock and the change in the average since the previous week.
Industry: Publicly held companies are sorted into industry groups. Each group designates a primary business focus for all companies in that industry group. There are over 200 different industry groups. This shows the name of the industry group each company is in, and it also shows that company's rank among all of the other companies in its industry group. The rank is determined based on the average recommendation of all brokers who are following that company. For example, if this company's industry rank is 1 of 20, then that means of all 20 companies in that industry group, the average recommendation of the brokers following this company is higher than the average broker recommendations for all of the other companies.
Upgrades & Downgrades: Provided by Briefing.com, is a summary of Wall Street analysts' change in ratings of stocks and the initiation of coverage by analysts.
See our complete list of ratings for details on each firm's range of ratings.