How Completely Do Analysts Incorporate Firm-Specific and Industry Information in Their Forecasts? Evidence and Implications for Post-Forecast Revision Drift

Abstract

Prior studies find a positive relation between analyst forecast revisions and upcoming news, suggesting that analysts’ forecast revisions are incomplete with respect to available information. In this study, we use the association between forecast revisions and upcoming news to measure forecast completeness and show that post-forecast-revision drift is higher when forecasts are incomplete. We follow Hui and Yeung’s (2013) approach to separate forecast revision news into industry-wide and firm-specific components because they find that drift is primarily associated with the industry component. We find that forecast revisions are less complete for industry-wide news than for firm-specific news. Furthermore, analysts’ industry-wide revisions are less complete early in the year and when the underlying news is bad, and we find stronger post-forecast-revision drift in those cases. We also show that analysts who were optimistic in prior periods tend to issue forecasts that are less complete and that generate stronger drift than forecasts by other analysts. Our findings provide an explanation for the drift that contrasts with prior studies that attribute the drift to investors’ slow assimilation of the news in forecast revisions. Thus, our study sheds light on analysts’ role in conveying firm-specific and industry-wide news to investors and on the implications for post-forecast-revision drift.