Monday, August 25, 2008

unique analyst advice on Telus

One has to wonder about stock analyst thinking when they read releases like the one I've copied below. Please feel free to take the advice of Jeffrey Fan and 'sell' shares of Canadian Telecom provider Telus (T.A) for the short term, but make sure that you buy Telus shares because they're cheap if you are a long term investor. It would be very easy to interpret this advice to mean 'sell the shares now, but buy again later when the stock is still at these low levels'. In other words trade/time the stock. What ever happened to sound, long term investing in quality companies. Easier said than done I guess.... Hey, at least he predicted a CAGR of the dividend of 10% through 2011.

Telus upgraded to 'buy' on valuation, but short-term 'sell' remains
UBS analyst Jeffrey Fan remains bearish on
Telus Corp., although he has bumped up his rating on the stock to "buy" from "neutral" on share price depreciation. News concerning fresh wireless entrants to the Canadian market and the potential Telus will build a next-generation HSPA network over its current CDMA one could weigh on shares in the short term, Mr. Fan wrote in a note to clients. He maintains his short-term "sell" rating on the stock. Telus shares have lost a third of their value since peaking at a 52-week high of $58.95 last September. Mr. Fan also noted the company has a four-year track record of announcing dividend increases alongside its third-quarter results. He believes this trend will continue and projects a three-year dividend CAGR of 10% through 2011.

2 comments:

Dividend Growth Investor said...

That's an interesting way to "predict" things - If the stock falls further by 2011 the analyst will be right in his short term forecast and get a nice bonus.
If the stock rises until 2011 he'd still be correct , bc the long-term investors are holding stock purchased at much lower levels.
The only losers are the investors, but they are always taken for granted. That's why they should read MoneyGardener's blog.

MG (moneygardener) said...

Good points DGI; he is correct either way. The only way he'll be wrong is if the stock rises nicely over the next year before falling hard for 10 years.