Portuguese analyst's financial reports informativeness How analysts' reports information content help investors in their investment decisions

The importance of sell side analysts' reports has long been studied, but basically based on two different perspectives, namely, their work consequences (market price reactions or trading strategies based on recommendations) and the factors that influence their work (information basis, herding or even bias behavior). We take here a different perspective by studying the importance of Portuguese financial sell-side analyst reports investigating whether their reports are able to deliver the information users need and simultaneously offer coherent calculation that justifies the target price. In order to obtain reliable results we explore and encode the complete content of 91 reports from PSI20 listed companies. The informativeness provided is tested against an ideal report built mainly from the Jenkins Report conclusions, using content analysis. Empirical results allow us to say that sell side analysts play a crucial role in financial markets, given that in the case of Portuguese investment firms, financial reports are able to answer the main questions as required by "ideal reports." This study results could be easily extended in the near future to other countries.