At The Motley Fool, we poke plenty of fun at Wall Street analysts and their endless cycle of upgrades, downgrades, and "initiating coverage at neutral." So you might think we'd be the last people to give virtual ink to such "news." And we would be -- if that were all we were doing.
But in This Just In, we don't simply tell you what the analysts said. We'll also show you whether they know what they're talking about. To help, we've enlisted Motley Fool CAPS, our tool for rating stocks and analysts alike. With CAPS, we'll be tracking the long-term performance of Wall Street's best and brightest -- and worst and sorriest, too.
And speaking of the best...
Motley Fool Rule Breakers
subscribers started the week off with a bang this morning. "Predicting" (for an explanation of the quotes, see below) a faster-than-previously-expected adoption rate for the company's products, Oppenheimer gave Intuitive Surgical
Good news for investors who listened to any of our three recommendations of the stock -- up 38%, 102%, and 218%, respectively. But can a stock that we recommended a little more than two years ago at $44 and change really hit the $155 target Oppenheimer posits within a year? For clues to the analyst's prescience, we turn once again to Motley Fool CAPS for a glimpse at Oppenheimer's record.
There we learn that Oppenheimer holds the title of "CAPS All-Star" by virtue of its 81.65 player rating -- but only by the skin of its teeth, since a score of 80.00 is the cutoff for this title. With an accuracy rating of 52%, the analyst gets slightly more than half its picks right. A few of those winners include:
|
Oppenheimer Says: |
CAPS Says: |
Oppenheimer's Pick Beating S&P by: |
|
|---|---|---|---|
|
Ceragon Networks |
Outperform |
**** |
73 points |
|
O2Micro |
Outperform |
** |
22 points |
|
Adobe |
Outperform |
**** |
10 points |
And now, for a few of Oppenheimer's losers:
|
Oppenheimer Says: |
CAPS Says: |
Oppenheimer's Pick Lagging S&P by: |
|
|---|---|---|---|
|
Nuvelo |
Outperform |
** |
92 points |
|
Kensey Nash |
Outperform |
** |
32 points |
|
Papa John's |
Outperform |
** |
12 points |
Foolish final thoughts
I must admit -- the sight of a pair of medical-related stocks (Nuvelo, a biotech startup, and Kensey Nash, which makes absorbable biomaterials), topping the list of Oppenheimer's losers doesn't instill a lot of confidence.
Nor does Oppenheimer wildly misjudged call on Intuitive Surgical last time around. At about the same time our team at Rule Breakers gave Intuitive Surgical its first re-recommendation back in October 2005, Oppenheimer was just discovering the firm, initiating coverage with a "neutral" rating. (Reminder: The stock is up 112% since then, versus a 29% gain for the S&P 500 -- that's a good 83 points worth of underperformance the analyst has to make up for.) For investors' sakes, I just hope Oppenheimer isn't arriving too late to this party.
Just discovering Intuitive Surgical yourself? Catch up on what others already know -- read our interview with CEO Lonnie Smith.
Then check out what your fellow investors are saying about the stock. They may not all be professional stock pickers, but seeing as a non-professional holds the CAPS record for predicting this stock's performance, I'd say that doesn't matter a whole lot. Learn who's best in class on Intuitive Surgical on CAPS.
Fool contributor Rich Smith does not own shares of any company named above. You can find him on CAPS, publicly pontificating under the handle TMFDitty, where he's currently ranked No. 1812 out of more than 29,000 raters. The Fool has a disclosure policy.
