Buy, Sell, or Hold? Information Extraction from Stock Analyst Reports

This paper presents a novel linguistic information extraction approach exploiting analysts' stock ratings for statistical decision making. Over a period of one year, we gathered German stock analyst reports in order to determine market trends. Our goal is to provide business statistics over time to illustrate market trends for a user-selected company. We therefore recognize named entities within the very short stock analyst reports such as organization names (e.g. BASF, BMW, Ericsson), analyst houses (e.g. Gartner, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs), ratings (e.g. buy, sell, hold, underperform, recommended list) and price estimations by using lexicalized finite-state graphs, so-called local grammars. Then, company names and their acronyms respectively have to be cross-checked against data the analysts provide. Finally, all extracted values are compared and presented into charts with different views depending on the evaluation criteria (e.g. by time line). Thanks to this approach it will be easier and even more comfortable in the future to pay attention to analysts' buy/sell signals without reading all their reports.