March 2026

Building an Analyst Coverage Tracker

For a while now, I've wanted to build a tracker that would look at the discrepancy between the price of a stock and the average price target from analyst coverage. I've now created it.

As a bit of background for folks who are less familiar, analyst coverage is when a bank will publish research on a stock. This will generally include company background, a financial model, and a price target, which is where they think the price will be 12 to 24 months from now. As an example, Nvidia currently has a share price of $184 and an analyst price target of $264, meaning that on-average, bank analysts think there is ~40% upside to the stock in the near term.

What's important to note is that on-average, analyst coverage is quite bullish. This is for a few reasons, but mainly banks like to maintain relationships with companies, and in the event that their analyst is bearish on a stock, it tarnishes the relationship. As a result banks will only list a target price that is lower than the current price ~10-20% of the time, and greater than the current price ~80-90% of the time. While this slightly dilutes the purpose of this tracker, the directional estimates are still helpful.

Coverage can vary depending on the stock: some stocks may have ~1-2 analysts covering it, some like Nvidia may have ~30-40 analysts. It generally correlates with the size of the company: the larger the company, the more analysts cover it.

Lastly, there is a time element to this as well. Analysts can't change their price targets with every piece of information, so they'll often update their targets a few times a year. They will generally be updated in-line with major events: earnings releases, mergers, large swings in the stock price or market, etc. Why is this important? Well if price targets were issued in April 2025, and it's currently March 2026, a lot can happen in-between now and then.

The motivation for building this is to see when there is a large disconnect: if the price is currently much lower than the average price target, it could be an interesting signal. As a result, I created a quick dashboard that will allow users to look at this delta. It's mainly focused on technology and consumer companies with <$5B market cap, which is where I spend most of my time when evaluating stocks.

Future Model Updates

While this is a v1, there are a few modifications I hope to make.

First, there should be some time weight element to this. The average price target could include outdated data, and as a result should not be included or weighted lesser. I used Yahoo Finance for the v1, so unfortunately it does not include individual price targets (just the aggregate) otherwise I would have broken this out more.

Second, there should be something more thought into how we view analyst discrepancy: as an example, if there is high variance in analyst price targets (e.g., someone values Nvidia at $200 and someone values Nvidia at $800) that could be an interesting signal. It's tough to tell though if analyst discrepancy could mean poor coverage of the name vs. signal that could be used in an investment screener or decision. In the interim, we have a simple confidence score: the more analysts, the more confidence there is in a stock.

Lastly, I'd hope to expand the universe of stocks. Right now it is the S&P 600, but by including more indexes, like the Russell 2000, we could get more names to add to this.