Analyst Coverage & Ratings
How Wall Street prices, rates, and tracks public companies.
- Sell-side analyst
- An analyst employed by an investment bank or brokerage (Morgan Stanley, Stifel, H.C. Wainwright, etc.) who publishes research reports with ratings (Buy / Hold / Sell) and price targets for the firm’s clients. Sell-side research is public-facing — if you’ve ever seen “Wall Street price target,” that came from sell-side analysts.
- Buy-side analyst
- An analyst employed by an institution that actually buys and holds stocks for its own portfolios — mutual funds, hedge funds, pension funds, and the like. Their research is internal and used to drive the firm’s own investment decisions, so it generally is not published. “What the buy side is doing” usually means which institutional investors are accumulating or selling the stock.
- Price target
- An analyst’s projected share price twelve months out. Typically published alongside a Buy / Hold / Sell rating. Different firms can have very different targets on the same stock — that’s why we publish the full analyst panel rather than just the average.
- Buy / Hold / Sell (Overweight / Equal-Weight / Underweight)
- The actual recommendation a sell-side analyst attaches to a stock. Different firms use different vocabularies — Overweight, Outperform, and Buy are roughly equivalent; Equal-Weight, Market Perform, and Hold are roughly equivalent; Underweight, Underperform, and Sell are roughly equivalent.
- Initiation of coverage
- The first time a research firm publishes a report on a given stock. Initiations are notable because they signal that a new analyst team has decided the company is large or interesting enough to track on an ongoing basis.
Capital Structure & Funding
How a public company is financed, sized, and how that financing changes over time.
- Market capitalization (market cap)
- The total dollar value of a company’s outstanding shares. Calculated as share price × shares outstanding. The simplest single number for “how big is this company.”
- Shares outstanding
- The total number of shares a company has issued and that are currently held by all investors (insiders, institutions, retail). Used in the market cap calculation.
- Float
- The portion of a company’s shares outstanding that is actually available for public trading — i.e., excluding insider holdings and other locked-up shares. A small float can mean higher volatility.
- IPO (Initial Public Offering)
- The first time a company sells shares to the public on a stock exchange. After the IPO, the company is “public” and its shares trade openly.
- Secondary offering
- A sale of new (or existing) shares by a company that is already public. Often used to raise additional capital. New share issuance in a secondary offering causes dilution.
- Cash runway
- How long the company can fund operations at its current burn rate before it needs to raise more money. A short runway often forces a dilutive capital raise.
- Dilution
- What happens to existing shareholders when a company issues new shares — each existing holder owns a smaller percentage of the company afterward. A common drag on the stock price ahead of capital raises.
- Warrant exercises
- When existing warrant holders convert their warrants into new common shares, paying the strike price to the company. Exercises bring cash in to the company, but also add shares (and therefore some dilution).
- Insider buying / insider selling
- Officers, directors, and 10%-plus owners are required to publicly disclose their buys and sells of company stock via SEC Form 4. Insider buying is widely viewed as a bullish signal; insider selling is more ambiguous (often planned and routine, but can also signal concern).
Trading Mechanics
The day-to-day vocabulary of how a stock actually trades.
- 52-week range (52-week high / 52-week low)
- The highest and lowest prices a stock has traded at over the trailing twelve months. A useful quick read on where the current price sits in the recent range.
- Average daily volume (ADV)
- The average number of shares of the stock that change hands per trading day, usually measured over the trailing 30 or 90 days. Lower ADV = thinner liquidity = wider price moves on the same news.
- Catalyst
- A specific upcoming event with the potential to move the stock — an earnings release, a clinical-trial readout, a regulatory decision, a product launch, an analyst day. Most of our profiles include a “catalysts to watch” section because timing matters as much as the thesis.
Regulatory & Public-Sector
Government and regulatory terms that come up in market commentary.
- SEC EDGAR
- The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s public filings system. Every public-company filing — 10-Ks (annual reports), 10-Qs (quarterly reports), 8-Ks (material events), insider transactions, prospectuses, etc. — lives there. The original-source record on any U.S. public company.
- Executive Order
- A presidential directive to federal agencies. Executive Orders can change the operating environment for entire industries (drug approvals, energy permitting, tariffs, etc.) without requiring new legislation.
