On holding stocks

I never understood one thing about investment analyst reports – the “hold” recommendation. This is “between” the “buy” and “sell” recommendations (which are self-explanatory), and it tells an investor to hold on to the stock if he already owns it, but not to buy if he doesn’t.

The problem with this is that the difference between buying and holding a stock is small, especially given the current efficiency of equity markets and consequent low transaction costs. The only difference between holding and not holding a stock is that in the latter case, you spend the transaction cost of buying the stock. That is all. Based on this, it is intriguing that the two have remained distinct analyst recommendations for ages now.

I can think of two possible explanations:

 

  1. One can assume that the investor is fully invested (not holding any cash), and so buying a stock means that he has to sell something else in order to allocate capital to this stock. So in other words, the cost of getting the stock into you portfolio is higher than the trading cost itself – it comes in at the cost of another stock. With these increased transaction costs, it’s possible that it’s not worth buying the stock .

  2. Analysts hate to admit it (look at the precision with which they dictate price targets), but there is a wide band of error around their estimates of what price the stock will trade at at some point of time in the future. So the buys are those that are much more likely to be trading up than the holds. So by saying “hold” you are saying “yeah this stock might go up, so I’m not so confident about it so don’t bother buying if you don’t have it already”.

But then there is this school of thought that says that analyst’s buy/hold/sell recommendations do not matter at all, and the value they add is in providing the investor access to the company’s management. Matt Levine has written plenty about this, and you should read his latest stuff on this.

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