Consensus Recommendation
Consensus recommendation is the opinion expressed by the analysts on the stock performance over a short term period. S&P Global provides both the Broker Recommendations and Standardized Recommendations. S&P Global will standardize all the individual recommendations across the brokers on a 1- 5 point scale.
It is an aggregation of all recommendations for a particular stock. Each recommendation is assigned a number:
| Recommendation | Number Assigned |
|---|---|
| Buy | 1 - 1.499 |
| Outperform | 1.5 - 2.5 |
| Hold | 2.501 - 3.499 |
| Underperform | 3.5 - 4.5 |
| Sell | 4.501 - 5 |
An average of these numbers are taken to find a “consensus.” For example, if a Company had 2 “buy” recommendations and 2 “outperform” recommendations, the consensus recommendation would be 1.5, since it is the average of the assigned numbers.