In financial markets, underweight is a term used when rating stock by a financial analyst. A rating system may be three-tiered: "overweight," equal weight, and underweight, or five-tiered: buy, overweight, hold, underweight, and sell. Also used are outperform, neutral, underperform, and buy, accumulate, hold, reduce, and sell.
If a stock is deemed underweight, the analyst is saying they consider the investor should reduce their holding, so that it should "weigh" less within the investment portfolio. [1] For example, if an investor has 10% of their stocks in Retail, 25% in Manufacturing, 50% in Hi-Tech, and 15% in Defense, and the broker says that Retail is "underweight," then they are implying a smaller percentage of the stocks should be in Retail. The stock's total return is expected to be below the average total return of the analyst's industry (or industry team's) coverage universe, on a risk-adjusted basis, over the next 12-18 months.
Fundamental analysis, in accounting and finance, is the analysis of a business's financial statements ; health; competitors and markets. It also considers the overall state of the economy and factors including interest rates, production, earnings, employment, GDP, housing, manufacturing and management. There are two basic approaches that can be used: bottom up analysis and top down analysis. These terms are used to distinguish such analysis from other types of investment analysis, such as quantitative and technical.
Passive management is an investing strategy that tracks a market-weighted index or portfolio. Passive management is most common on the equity market, where index funds track a stock market index, but it is becoming more common in other investment types, including bonds, commodities and hedge funds.
Investment is traditionally defined as the "commitment of resources to achieve later benefits". If an investment involves money, then it can be defined as a "commitment of money to receive more money later". From a broader viewpoint, an investment can be defined as "to tailor the pattern of expenditure and receipt of resources to optimise the desirable patterns of these flows". When expenditures and receipts are defined in terms of money, then the net monetary receipt in a time period is termed cash flow, while money received in a series of several time periods is termed cash flow stream.
In finance, being short in an asset means investing in such a way that the investor will profit if the market value of the asset falls. This is the opposite of the more common long position, where the investor will profit if the market value of the asset rises. An investor that sells an asset short is, as to that asset, a short seller.
Day trading is a form of speculation in securities in which a trader buys and sells a financial instrument within the same trading day, so that all positions are closed before the market closes for the trading day to avoid unmanageable risks and negative price gaps between one day's close and the next day's price at the open. Traders who trade in this capacity are generally classified as speculators. Day trading contrasts with the long-term trades underlying buy-and-hold and value investing strategies. Day trading may require fast trade execution, sometimes as fast as milli-seconds in scalping, therefore direct-access day trading software is often needed.
A hedge is an investment position intended to offset potential losses or gains that may be incurred by a companion investment. A hedge can be constructed from many types of financial instruments, including stocks, exchange-traded funds, insurance, forward contracts, swaps, options, gambles, many types of over-the-counter and derivative products, and futures contracts.
A financial analyst is a professional, undertaking financial analysis for external or internal clients as a core feature of the job. The role may specifically be titled securities analyst, research analyst, equity analyst, investment analyst, or ratings analyst. The job title is a broad one: in banking, and industry more generally, various other analyst-roles cover financial management and (credit) risk management, as opposed to focusing on investments and valuation; these are also discussed in this article.
Contrarian investing is an investment strategy that is characterized by purchasing and selling in contrast to the prevailing sentiment of the time.
Market timing is the strategy of making buying or selling decisions of financial assets by attempting to predict future market price movements. The prediction may be based on an outlook of market or economic conditions resulting from technical or fundamental analysis. This is an investment strategy based on the outlook for an aggregate market rather than for a particular financial asset.
Business valuation is a process and a set of procedures used to estimate the economic value of an owner's interest in a business. Here various valuation techniques are used by financial market participants to determine the price they are willing to pay or receive to effect a sale of the business. In addition to estimating the selling price of a business, the same valuation tools are often used by business appraisers to resolve disputes related to estate and gift taxation, divorce litigation, allocate business purchase price among business assets, establish a formula for estimating the value of partners' ownership interest for buy-sell agreements, and many other business and legal purposes such as in shareholders deadlock, divorce litigation and estate contest.
Within the stock market, the term overweight can be used in two different contexts.
In finance and investing, rebalancing of investments is a strategy of bringing a portfolio that has deviated away from one's target asset allocation back into line. This can be implemented by transferring assets, that is, selling investments of an asset class that is overweight and using the money to buy investments in a class that is underweight, but it also applies to adding or removing money from a portfolio, that is, putting new money into an underweight class, or making withdrawals from an overweight class.
Sell side is a term used in the financial services industry to mean providing services to sell securities. Firms or institutions on this side include investment banks, brokerages and market makers, who facilitate offering securities to investors, conducting research and creating financial products.
An equity-linked note (ELN) is a debt instrument, usually a bond issued by a financial institution such as an investment bank or a subsidiary of a commercial bank. ELNs are liabilities of the issuer, but the final payout to the investor is based on an unrelated company's stock price, a stock index or a group of stocks or stock indices. The underlying stocks typically have large market capitalizations. Equity-linked notes are a type of structured product and are often marketed to unsophisticated retail investors.
Securities research is a discipline within the financial services industry. Securities research professionals are known most generally as "analysts", "research analysts", or "securities analysts"; all the foregoing terms are synonymous. Research analysts produce research reports and typically issue a recommendation: buy ("overweight"), hold, or sell ("underweight"); see target price and trade idea.
There are two basic financial market participant distinctions, investors versus speculators and institutional versus retail. Action in financial markets by central banks is usually regarded as intervention rather than participation.
In finance, momentum is the empirically observed tendency for rising asset prices or securities return to rise further, and falling prices to keep falling. For instance, it was shown that stocks with strong past performance continue to outperform stocks with poor past performance in the next period with an average excess return of about 1% per month. Momentum signals have been used by financial analysts in their buy and sell recommendations.
In finance, a stock index, or stock market index, is an index that measures the performance of a stock market, or of a subset of a stock market. It helps investors compare current stock price levels with past prices to calculate market performance.
Mark J. Hulbert is an American finance analyst, journalist, and author with a focus on expectations of stock market investment newsletters, contrarian investing, and quantitive or technical analysis.
Economic turmoil associated with the COVID-19 pandemic has had wide-ranging and severe impacts upon financial markets, including stock, bond, and commodity markets. Major events included a described Russia–Saudi Arabia oil price war, which after failing to reach an OPEC+ agreement resulted in a collapse of crude oil prices and a stock market crash in March 2020. The effects upon markets are part of the COVID-19 recession and are among the many economic impacts of the pandemic.