When you're looking to research a stock who should you listen to, Wall Street or Main Street? Wall Street's analysts don't have the greatest track record. They're known to be short-sighted, overly optimistic, and never negative. (Seriously, when was the last time you saw a company with a sell rating?) Savvy investors read their research, but ignore their buy and sell ratings. Who can you trust instead?
At Motley Fool CAPS, we use the collective opinion of 165,000 investors (Main Street) to inform our stock ratings. Members are scored on their accuracy and their overall outperformance of the S&P 500. We then aggregate all the ratings, giving the opinions of higher-scoring members more influence over a stock's CAPS rating.
Let's see how CAPS and the analysts compare on a couple of stocks:
|
Stock
|
Analysts' Buy Rating (out of 5)
|
CAPS Rating
|
P/E
|
P/B
|
|
Visa (NYSE: V )
|
4.4
|
***
|
23.8
|
2.6
|
|
Costco (Nasdaq: COST )
|
3.8
|
****
|
20.1
|
2.2
|
Source: Yahoo! Finance.
Visa
Wall Street loves Visa, but Main Street isn't nearly as bullish. Visa, MasterCard (NYSE: MA ) , and American Express (NYSE: AXP ) have all been down the past three months, amid concerns over the financial reform bill and the potential for a strong Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Already, investors and consumers are worried about unintended consequences of any actions the government takes.
With regulation still up in the air, and none of these companies particularly cheap, I would pass on these three and take a closer look at eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY ) . The auction site looks inexpensive, and its Paypal service has a chance to disrupt the credit card industry going forward. Another possible winner is Discover Financial Services (NYSE: DFS ) , trading at only eight times earnings, which is a dark horse in the credit card race.
Costco
Main Street and Wall Street are equally bullish on Costco, and why not? The company is one of the dominant retailers in the U.S., providing high-quality, inexpensive merchandise for budget-minded consumers. That formula works equally well in good times and bad. Costco’s membership model is also unique among retailers, and a source of the majority of the company’s profit.
To top it off, Costco has an extraordinary management team lead by CEO Jim Sinegal, who also owns a decent stake in the business. For all these reasons, Costco trades at a premium to other retailers. While it's not cheap now, Costco remains a company to keep on your watchlist.
Given Wall Street's perpetual bullishness on virtually every stock around, you should turn instead to the completely free CAPS, and harness the wisdom of the crowd for your stock research.
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