Let’s say that a bank such as Goldman Sachs publishes a recommendation to “Buy Stock Xâ€.
It’s hard to ignore a bit by a powerful investment bank such as Goldman. We are mere mortals in the pecking order, and they are supposed to be the all-knowing smart money from Wall Street.
Do we buy the stock, or is it simply wiser to pass?
BANK PERFORMANCE OVERALL
The folks at InterTrader have done the considerable legwork to dive deep into the data on investment bank recommendations made in 2015. They looked at every bet made by the 16 top banks throughout the year to assess both potential returns and accuracy.
The results are pretty underwhelming.
If you bought every stock recommended and held until the end of the year, here’s what your performance would look like:
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Overall, when holding the stock picks for the year, banks were only 43% accurate with their predictions.
That’s right – flipping a coin would have been potentially more effective than buying bank stock picks, which ended up down -4.79% on the year. The S&P 500 finished down only -0.69%, but simply just making any interest in a savings account would have been more effective as well.
A CLOSER LOOK AT INDIVIDUAL BANKS
While banks as a whole struggled with picks in 2015, it’s also important to look at banks on a more micro level to see how they performed.
Here’s a look at the recommendations by Deutsche Bank, and how they did:
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Deutsche Bank nailed 41% of their predictions and had a -8.93% return if picks were held throughout the year.
As you can see, some of their picks such as Microsoft and Wix.com gained double digits. On the other hand, recommendations such as Whiting Petroleum got absolutely crushed throughout the year, dropping -70.1%.
Overall, Deutsche Bank’s performance here definitely didn’t do much to help the struggling company get out of its rut.
