Corporate Finance Commons^™

An Examination Of Value Line’S Long-Term Projection, Andrew Szakmary, C. Mitchell Conover, Carol Lancaster

Finance Faculty Publications

Unlike previous papers, which have focused on the timeliness ranks, we examine Value Line’s 3–5 year projections for stock returns, earnings, sales and related measures. We find that Value Line’s stock return and earnings forecasts exhibit large positive bias, although their sales predictions do not. For stock returns, Value Line’s projections lack predictive power; for other variables predictive power may exist to some degree. Our findings suggest the spectacular past performance of the timeliness indicator reflects either close alignment with other known anomalies or data mining, and that investors and researchers should use Value Line’s long-term projections with caution.