Graph-Based Stock Recommendation by Time-Aware Relational Attention Network

The stock market investors aim at maximizing their investment returns. Stock recommendation task is to recommend stocks with higher return ratios for the investors. Most stock prediction methods study the historical sequence patterns to predict stock trend or price in the near future. In fact, the future price of a stock is correlated not only with its historical price, but also with other stocks. In this article, we take into account the relationships between stocks (corporations) by stock relation graph. Furthermore, we propose a Time-aware Relational Attention Network (TRAN) for graph-based stock recommendation according to return ratio ranking. In TRAN, the time-aware relational attention mechanism is designed to capture time-varying correlation strengths between stocks by the interaction of historical sequences and stock description documents. With the dynamic strengths, the nodes of the stock relation graph aggregate the features of neighbor stock nodes by graph convolution operation. For a given group of stocks, the proposed TRAN model can output the ranking results of stocks according to their return ratios. The experimental results on several real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our TRAN for stock recommendation.

Affective practices in mid-18th-century German music-making: reflections on C. P. E. Bach’s advice to performers

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach stated that a musical performer ‘must of necessity be able to transport himself into all of the affections that he wants to arouse in his listeners’. As famous as this passage is, it still raises questions. Did Bach mean that performers must arouse and feel all the shifting affections of the music within their own bodies, or was he using a metaphor here? Were composers supposed to feel the affections in their music while they composed it, as Bach suggested? Was this demand specific to Bach alone, or was it a stock recommendation given by many mid-18th-century German music writers? This article explores similar recommendations in historical sources and describes how Bach’s strategy might be enacted by performers. In an ideal empfindsam concert, the listener’s sympathetic response to the music would have been reinforced by the physical manifestations of the performer’s affective state.

The association of analysts’ cash flow forecasts with stock recommendation profitability

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine whether analysts’ cash flow forecasts improve the profitability of their stock recommendations and whether the positive effect of cash flow forecasts on analysts’ stock recommendation performance varies with firms’ earnings quality. Design/methodology/approach To test the authors’ predictions, they identify a sample of 161,673 stock recommendations with contemporaneous earnings forecasts and/or cash flow forecasts and regress market-adjusted stock returns on a binary variable that proxies for the issuance of cash flow forecasts while controlling for contemporaneous earnings forecast accuracy, earnings quality, analysts’ forecast experience and capability and certain firm characteristics. The authors’ test results are robust to alternative measures of recommendation profitability, earnings quality and the use of recommendation revisions instead of recommendation levels. Findings The authors find that when analysts issue cash flow forecasts concurrently with earnings forecasts, their stock recommendations lead to higher profitability than when they only issue earnings forecasts, after controlling for analysts’ forecast capability. Moreover, the authors document that the contemporaneous positive relationship between cash flow forecasts and recommendations profitability is stronger for firms with low earnings quality than for firms with high earnings quality. The findings suggest that cash flow forecasts issued by analysts in response to market demand likely play a more important role in firm valuation than cash flow forecasts issued by analysts mainly because of supply-side considerations. Research limitations/implications Future research could build on these findings to conduct further investigation on the alternative incentives for analysts’ forecasts of sales growth and long-term growth rates. Practical implications These findings may also help investors to better assess the quality of analysts’ research outputs and to identify superior stock recommendations. Originality/value This study provides insight into the role of cash flow forecasts in firm valuation and adds fresh evidence to the debate on the usefulness of cash flow forecasts. It extends the stream of research on the characteristics of analyst forecasts and increases our knowledge about the role of analysts in the financial market.