It’s definitely been a happy New Year for Las Vegas Sands Corp. The casino developer and operator saw its share price rise by 45 percent in three days, making up somewhat for the 94.25 percent value the stock shed in the latter part of 2008.
Although no single analyst can take the credit for this turnaround, one of the first to speak up in favour of LVS after weeks of unrelenting negative reviews appears to be Jake Fuller of Thomas Weisel Partners LLC.
“We maintain our positive bias on the view that current valuation appropriately discounts near-term estimate risk and we see material upside potential against recovered earnings in the 2010 to 2011 timeframe,” he wrote in a client note at the turn of 2008.
The fact that analysts occasionally seem to gang up against a company is not necessarily a bad thing.
The Victorian scientist Sir Francis Galton, a half cousin of Charles Darwin, once noted that the crowd at a country fair accurately guessed the weight of an ox when their individual guesses were averaged.
This ‘wisdom of crowds’ probably also applies to analysts’ assessments of companies. It takes either a bold analyst or one armed with a competitive advantage when it comes to information on the fundamentals of a corporation, to go against the group view.
Whether Mr Fuller is bold, exceptionally well informed or both, time will tell.
