The Trend in Firm Profitability and the Cross-Section of Stock Returns

2017 ◽  
Vol 92 (5) ◽  
pp. 1-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ferhat Akbas ◽  
Chao Jiang ◽  
Paul D. Koch

ABSTRACT This study shows that the recent trajectory of a firm's profits predicts future profitability and stock returns. The predictive information contained in the trend of profitability is not subsumed by the level of profitability, earnings momentum, or other well-known determinants of stock returns. The profit trend also predicts the earnings surprise one quarter later, and analyst forecast errors over the following 12 months, suggesting that sophisticated investors underreact to the information in the profit trend. On the other hand, we find no evidence of investor overreaction, and our results cannot be explained by well-known risk factors. JEL Classifications: G12; G14.

Author(s):  
Zoe Ventoura–Neokosmidi

An empirical investigation of the relationship between advertising to sales ratio, market share and firm profitability was carried out. Cross section analysis was used over 36 companies that produce fast moving consumer goods, for the year 2002. This paper finds that market share has a positive impact on firm profitability. In contrast to our expectation, the influence of market share is greater than that of advertising to sales ratio. To further examine the contribution of each explanatory variable after the other has been included in the model, the partial F?test was used. The obtained results verify the cross section analysis results.


Author(s):  
Ray Pfeiffer ◽  
Karen Teitel ◽  
Susan Wahab ◽  
Mahmoud Wahab

Previous research indicates that analysts’ forecasts are superior to time series models as measures of investors’ earnings expectations. Nevertheless, research also documents predictable patterns in analysts’ forecasts and forecast errors. If investors are aware of these patterns, analysts’ forecast revisions measured using the random walk expectation are an incomplete representation of changes in investors’ earnings expectations. Investors can use knowledge of errors and biases in forecasts to improve upon the simple random walk expectation by incorporating conditioning information. Using data from 2005 to 2015, we compare associations between market-adjusted stock returns and alternative specifications of forecast revisions to determine which best represents changes in investors’ earnings expectations. We find forecast revisions measured using a ‘bandwagon expectations’ specification, which includes two prior analysts’ forecast signals and provides the most improvement over random-walk-based revision measures. Our findings demonstrate benefits to considering information beyond the previously issued analyst forecast when representing investors’ expectations of analysts’ forecasts.


2017 ◽  
Vol 93 (3) ◽  
pp. 349-377 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Veenman ◽  
Patrick Verwijmeren

ABSTRACT This study presents evidence suggesting that investors do not fully unravel predictable pessimism in sell-side analysts' earnings forecasts. We show that measures of prior consensus and individual analyst forecast pessimism are predictive of both the sign of firms' earnings surprises and the stock returns around earnings announcements. That is, we find that firms with a relatively high probability of forecast pessimism experience significantly higher announcement returns than those with a low probability. Importantly, we show that these findings are driven by predictable pessimism in analysts' short-term forecasts, as opposed to optimism in their longer-term forecasts. We further find that this mispricing is related to the difficulty investors have in identifying differences in expected forecast pessimism. Overall, we conclude that market prices do not fully reflect the conditional probability that a firm meets or beats earnings expectations as a result of analysts' pessimistically biased short-term forecasts. JEL Classifications: G12; G14; G20.


Author(s):  
Nikolay Doskov ◽  
Tapio Pekkala ◽  
Ruy Ribeiro

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