we validate is important. we investigate isn't. the first is a comment
about results; the second is merely a report about you, which you should
drop.
its a bit hard to figure out from the abstract what the key substantive
findings of your work are. i would try to emphasize in the abstract, and
of course in the paper, exactly how someone who believes your results
completely will look at the world differently. then you have to convince
them you're right. but the point -- in terms of how they look at the
world rather than what you did -- is what you want to emphasize.
Gary
On Wed, 2 May 2007, Luyi Zhao wrote:
Analyst-based Predictions of Future Stock Returns
In this paper, we investigate the findings of Karl B. Diether, Christopher
J. Malloy, and Anna Scherbina in their paper \emph{Differences of Opinion}.
We validate their claim that greater differences of opinion in analyst
predictions of future stock returns tracks poorer future returns of stocks
and that small and poorly performing stocks are especially affected. We
extend this project by exploring the relationship between a stock's returns
and the number of analysts covering the stock (coverage). We also use the
normalized difference between a stock's predicted expected returns and its
current returns (potential) to improve upon the original paper's
dispersion-based portfolio strategy. Surprisingly, we found that stocks
covered by the median number of analysts performed best, and portfolios of
stocks with the greatest positive potential outperformed stocks with the
greatest negative potential by a large margin.