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Contents

• Basics
• Equity Research
• Earnings Surprises
• Earnings Calendar
• Research By Industry
• Using Zacks Information On Your Site

Basics

• Zacks Investment Research provides Yahoo! Finance users with consensus estimates and a summary of analyst recommendations on over 6,000 equities (updated weekly), as well as daily Earnings Surprises (updated every 15 minutes on market days) and an Earnings Calendar (updated daily).
• All information provided by Zacks on Yahoo! Finance is free. More in-depth analysis is available for charge directly from Zacks. You can get a free trial to Zacks premium services which includes: daily email alerts, company reports, custom screening, research software, and brokerage research reports.

Equity Research

• Number of Brokers Recommending As:

  There are five different recommendations a broker will give for a stock: These are Strong Buy, Moderate Buy, Hold, Moderate Sell, and Strong Sell. This caption shows the combined recommendations of all the brokers currently following this stock.

  For example, if you see:
  

  Strong Buy		1
  Moderate Buy		3
  Hold 			0
  Moderate Sell		1
  Strong Sell		0

  it means that of the five brokers currently following this stock, one of is recommending this stock as a Strong Buy, three brokers are recommending this stock as a Moderate Buy, and one broker is recommending this stock as a Moderate Sell.

• Next Earnings (Approx.):

  Publicly held companies are required by law to provide earnings reports to their shareholders. ``Next Earnings'' is when the next earnings reports are to be filed by this company. This date is based on when the company reported its earnings the previous year. Note that companies will not necessarily report their earnings on the same date every year.

• Average Recommendation:

  The five recommendations a broker will give to a stock are ``Strong Buy,'' ``Moderate Buy,'' ``Hold,'' ``Moderate Sell,'' and ``Strong Sell.'' For ease of understanding, these recommendations are sometimes assigned numbers ranging from 1 to 5. A number ``1'' represents a ``Strong Buy'' recommendation, and a number ``5'' represents a ``Strong Sell'' Recommendation. Here, the numbers represent the average recommendations of all the brokers following the stock and the change in the average since the previous week.

• Industry:

  Publicly held companies are sorted into industry groups. Each group designates a primary business focus for all companies in that industry group. There are over 200 different industry groups. This shows the name of the industry group each company is in, and it also shows that company's rank among all of the other companies in its industry group. The rank is determined based on the average recommendation of all brokers who are following that company. For example, if this company's industry rank is ``1 of 20,'' then that means of all 20 companies in that industry group, the average recommendation of the brokers following this company is higher than the average broker recommendations for all of the other companies.

• Earnings Per Share:

  This shows in $U.S. what the actual earnings per share were for this company's continuing operations in the last reported quarter. It also shows the Earnings Surprise percentage for the last quarter. The Earnings Surprise is the difference between the actual earnings per share (in $U.S.) reported from continuing operations and the analysts' consensus estimate for the quarter. For example, if this company's Surprise percentage is ``-1%,'' then the actual earnings per share for this company came in 1% below what the analysts had estimated their earnings would be.

• Consensus Estimates:

  Brokers will often estimate the future earnings per share (EPS) of a company. This shows the summary (consensus) EPS estimates of all brokers following this company for the current quarter, the current year, and the next year. For example, if this company's consensus estimates are:

  Cur. Quarter		2.39

  Then the analysts who are following this company more or less agree that the earnings per share for this company will be $2.39 in the current quarter.

Earnings Surprises

• Zacks Earnings Surprises displays the top ten positive surprises and the bottom ten negative surprises on a daily basis.
• ``Earnings Surprises'' are those earnings which are most out of line with analyst consensus estimates (either better or worse than expected) on a percentage basis.
• In order to provide only the most relevant earnings per share surprises, those surprises considered statistical anomalies are eliminated. Zacks has incorporated two different feature to provide only the most newsworthy surprises for the day:
  1. They incorporated a filter designed to eliminate any reported surprises that did not have at least 3 corporate analysts contributing to the consensus estimates. This was done to eliminate the possibility of one analyst poorly estimating earnings and therefore skewing the consensus figure to the point of exceptional earnings surprises.
  2. They incorporated a filter designed to eliminate any reported surprises that exceed 200% positive or negative. This filter will eliminate any of the statistical anomalies that may occur. For example, if a company has only one analyst covering it and he or she estimates $0.01 earnings per share and the company reports $0.04 per share the % surprise would be deceiving. Therefore, they eliminated any surprise over 200%.

Earnings Calendar

Research By Industry

Using Zacks Information On Your Site