An Empirical Study on the Accuracy of Analysts' Long-term Earnings Forecast

With the continuous development of the Chinese capital market over the past thirty years, the securities analyst industry has experienced a process of transformation from a reckless period to a golden time. One of the most important signals is that securities analysts are increasingly conducting research report providing long-term earnings forecasts for the company. However, current research on analysts is limited to their short-term forecasting behavior, and there is little on analysts' long-term earnings forecasts. Therefore, this article takes the research on analysts' long-term forecast reports issued by analysts on A-share listed companies, and conducts an empirical study on the analysts' forecasts accuracy and its influencing factors. First, the author combed the research literature related to analyst forecasts and selected variables from three dimensions, including company characteristics (financial indicators and non-financial indicators), analyst characteristics and affiliated institution characteristics; secondly, considering the high-dimensionality of the influencing factors, this paper uses the method of combining machine learning and traditional regression to conduct empirical research; finally, the research tested the heterogeneity of influencing factors from two perspectives, including time and industry.The results of this article show that the long-term profit forecasts of analysts in China have advantages over traditional statistical models. More than 60% of analysts provide profit forecasts that are better than statistical models. Afterwards, when examining the factors that affected the accuracy of analysts’ forecasts, it found that although analyst and institutional characteristics affected analysts’ predictions to a certain extent, company characteristics are the most important variables among them all. As the time goes by, the influence of non-financial factors on forecast accuracy gradually decreasing, but analyst characteristics continue to strengthen. In addition, cyclical industries are more difficult to predict than companies in non-cyclical industries, and the difficulty of prediction will not be reduced with the analyst efforts. This research can help analysts optimizing their forecasting behavior and prompts investors to understand analysts' reports more deeply, which makes them using analyst forecast data to make investment decisions in a rationally ways, and it can also help to promote the securities pricing efficiency and development of Chinese capital market.