Investors aim to maximize the return rate for their own investment, utilizing various information as possible as they can access. However those investors, especially individual investors, have limitations of interpretation of the domain-specific information or even the acquisition of the information itself. Thus, individual investors tend to make decision affectively and frequently, which may cause a loss in returns. This study aims to analyze analysts’ target price and to suggest the strategy that could maximize individual’s return rate. Most previous literature revealed that the optimistic bias exists in the analysts’ target price and it is also confirmed in this study. In this context, this study suggests the upper limit of target rate of returns and the optimal value named ‘alpha(α)’ which performs the adjustment of proposed target rate to maximize excess earning returns eventually. To achieve this goal, this study developed an optimization problem using linear programming. Specifically, when the analysts’ proposed target rate exceeds 30%, it could be adjusted to the extent of 59% of its own target rate. As apply this strategy, the investors could achieve 1.2% of excess earning rate on average. The result of this study has significance in that the individual investors could utilize analysts’ target price practically.

This paper attempts to measure the impact of non-financial factors including analyst practices and broker resources on performance of sell side research. Results reveal that these non-financial factors have a measurable impact on performance of target price forecasts. Number of pages written by an analyst (surrogate for analyst practice) is significantly and directly linked with target price accuracy indicating a more elaborate analyst produces better target price forecasts. Analyst compensation (surrogate for broker resource) is significantly and inversely linked with target price accuracy. Out performance by analysts working with lower paying firms is possibly associated with motivation to migrate to higher paying broking firms. The study finds that employing more number of analysts per research report has no significant impact on target price accuracy –negative coefficient indicates that team work may not result in better target price forecasts. Though insignificant, long term forecast horizon negatively affects target price accuracy while stock volatility improves target price accuracy.