Barron’s Bill Alpert raises the curtain on Visible Alpha’s full commercial launch, noting that “Wall Street’s consensus is about to get more inclusive.”
The combines the Street’s financial models and forecasts for more than 1,500 public companies. Before now, a “consensus” service might report the average of analysts’ forecasts of a company’s earnings per share, and maybe its revenue. Visible Alpha averages forecasts for hundreds of aspects of a company’s business, like the number of cars that Tesla could sell in the next few years, along with the predicted prices, profit margins, overhead, and tax rates expected on those sales.
Research firms often use different accounting conventions when modeling the same company. So Visible Alpha has needed lots of analysts and computer code to compile an apples-to-apples model that lets customers see where opinions really agree. Over time, Visible Alpha’s data will be able to take a fuller measure of Wall Street’s collective wisdom—or folly.
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