Market Guru Opinions

 

Which stock market experts do investors/traders want to know about most often? To develop a partial answer to this question, we examine the search engine inputs to the activity log of cxoadvisory.com. Using the the top 100 key word searches for the site over the period 5/24/06-5/23/07, we find that:

The following chart summarizes the relative frequencies of guru name searches (with variants consolidated) via external search engines arriving at cxoadvisory.com over the past year. Guru Grades covers all these experts. There appears to be no relationship between search frequency and forecast accuracy. The top three most searched gurus have only average to well below average accuracies, but they have frequent and systematic national media exposure.

Note that:

Only those gurus covered by cxoadvisory.com appear on this list. Those not covered by the site may have large numbers of searches referred elsewhere.

We initiated coverage of a few of these gurus since 5/24/06, potentially biasing their relative frequencies downward.

A few of these experts are "retired" in Guru Grades, in that they have discontinued public stock market forecasts.

In summary, media exposure, rather than forecasting accuracy, probably drives investor/trader attention to stock market gurus. (So why does the media not feature the best forecasters?)

The search engine companies may have some interesting data regarding which gurus most broadly influence the stock market.