A straight answer from seven years of ratings: how often analysts are right, why the average misleads, and what separates the analysts worth reading from the rest.
Some are; the average one is close to a coin flip. Exent replayed 628,792 ratings from the 1,000 top-ranked Wall Street equity analysts over seven years (statistics as of June 24, 2026). The average analyst’s price target was reached within 12 months 52.4% of the time. The median analyst came in at 53.9%.
That is the headline from the full analyst-accuracy study. It does not mean analysts are useless. It means the average rating, read without knowing who wrote it, carries less information than its confident tone suggests.
It depends on the question you ask, and the answers differ. Three common tests give three different pictures of the same analysts.
| Test | Question | Average analyst |
|---|---|---|
| Price target | Did the stock reach the target within 12 months? | 52.4% |
| Direction | Was the stock higher 12 months after the rating? | 64.0% |
| Size of move | What did the stock return over 12 months (median)? | +13.4% |
The direction test looks better, but it is a low bar. Most ratings are bullish, and the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) rose in six of the seven calendar years from 2019 to 2025. The price-target test is stricter, because the analyst committed to a number. For more on targets alone, see are analyst price targets accurate?
A lot. Of the 811 ranked analysts with a measurable hit rate, the best reached most of their targets and the weakest reached few.
| Hit rate | Analysts | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Below 50% | 321 | 39.6% |
| 50–70% | 369 | 45.5% |
| 70% or more | 121 | 14.9% |
Analysts with the top 5-star rating had a median hit rate of 60.8%, against 52.8% for 4-star analysts. The ranked names and their figures are in the most accurate stock analysts and on the analyst rankings.
Because Buy ratings vastly outnumber Sells. In the latest 12 months of ratings from the 1,000 top-ranked analysts in the same data, the mix was:
| Rating | Ratings | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Buy | 115,183 | 71.1% |
| Hold | 42,272 | 26.1% |
| Sell | 4,537 | 2.8% |
When almost everything is a Buy, a Buy on its own says little. A Hold can work as a polite negative, and a rare Sell stands out. The reasons are covered in why analysts rarely say sell.
The research is mixed and costs matter. A 2001 study in the Journal of Finance by Barber, Lehavy, McNichols and Trueman found that buying the most favorably rated stocks and shorting the least favorably rated produced annual abnormal gross returns above 4%. It required daily rebalancing, though, and after the resulting trading costs the returns were not reliably above zero.
A 2013 study in the Review of Accounting Studies found statistically significant but economically weak evidence that some analysts are persistently better at price targets than others. The practical reading: the signal exists, it is modest, and it is easy to give away through trading costs.
The step-by-step version is in how to judge an analyst, and how Gems work shows one way to require agreement among top-rated analysts. This is education, not personal advice, and past accuracy does not guarantee future accuracy.
In Exent’s 7-year backtest of 628,792 ratings, the average analyst’s price target was reached 52.4% of the time within 12 months, and the stock was higher a year later after 64% of ratings.
Slightly, on average. The median analyst reached 53.9% of price targets, but about 40% of measurable analysts reached fewer than half.
In the latest 12 months of Exent’s data, under 3% of ratings were Sell. Commonly cited reasons include company access, investment-banking relationships and career incentives.
Not blindly. Treat a rating as one input, check the analyst’s track record and sample size, and consider how the stock fits your portfolio. This is general education, not advice.
Exent tracks 4,000+ analysts, keeps only the elite few with proven records, and surfaces the Gems where they agree.
Educational content, not investment advice. Examples are illustrative; past performance does not guarantee future results.