For the Analyst: Peer Benchmarking Strategies to Enhance Earnings Forecasts

Discovering appropriate friends for monetary evaluation is a vexing process that requires cautious consideration of corporations’ underlying economics, accounting selections, and monetary assertion presentation. However with out comparable monetary assertion info, peer benchmarking might yield much less significant and even deceptive insights that negatively affect earnings forecasts.

In a latest examine revealed in The Accounting Evaluate, we developed a technique to determine comparable corporations for benchmarking and analyzed its implications for analyst outcomes and valuation with multiples. On this publish, we’ll spotlight the salient particulars, a few of which can shock you.

There are other ways to outline peer corporations, resembling {industry} membership, inventory index membership, closeness in market capitalization, and similarity in worth drivers (e.g., P/E ratio, return-on-invested capital, and progress).

As an alternative choice to conventional classifications, researchers have examined new methods to determine peer corporations, resembling traders’ co-search, depth of corporations’ filings with the SEC’s EDGAR, and inventory info on Yahoo! Finance.

These broadly utilized strategies fail to straight deal with an important side of agency benchmarking: the supply of key monetary assertion info for peer corporations. When a number of monetary assertion line gadgets are lacking for a peer agency, analysts wrestle to derive significant inferences from the comparative to the focal agency’s monetary statements.

Our monetary assertion benchmarking (FSB) measure goals to fill this hole. The information and code are freely obtainable on our web site.

Capturing the Diploma of Overlap Between Monetary Assertion Objects

Constructed on the Jaccard similarity coefficient, pairwise FSB captures the diploma of overlap in monetary assertion gadgets reported by two corporations, with scores starting from 0 (no overlap) to 1 (full overlap). The upper the FSB rating, the better the benchmarking info obtainable to exterior customers.

As an example, if the focal agency has reported 270 gadgets, 200 of which overlap with 220 gadgets reported by the peer agency, the FSB rating is 0.69 (200 / (270 + 220 – 200). To place this into context, the typical rating for analyst-chosen friends in our pattern is 0.68.

Assuming that FSB is a useful metric in capturing the similarity of two corporations’ underlying economics and accounting selections, we anticipate it to be positively correlated with analysts’ selections of peer corporations.

Our pattern of analyst-chosen friends comes from a Evaluate of Accounting Research article, “Analysts’ selection of peer firms.” By manually screening greater than 2,500 sell-side fairness analysts’ experiences, the authors extracted knowledge on comparable peer corporations chosen for the focal agency in every report.

In our examine, for every analyst-chosen peer agency, we chosen an identical agency in the identical {industry} that was not chosen however which had the same measurement and valuation a number of. The outcomes present that analysts have a tendency to decide on peer corporations which might be extra similar to a focal agency from a monetary assertion benchmarking perspective.

When FSB is greater by one-standard-deviation, the chance of being chosen as a peer agency by an analyst will increase by 13%.

Larger FSBs Improve Accuracy of Earnings Forecasts

Does selecting friends with greater FSBs have optimistic implications for analyst efficiency? We discover that when the typical FSB of the set of analyst-chosen peer corporations is one-standard-deviation greater, the accuracy of analysts’ earnings forecasts will increase by about 23%.

When deciding on peer corporations, search for corporations which have extra comparable monetary statements to the focal agency, even when which means looking exterior the focal agency’s essential {industry}. In reality, solely 40% of the analyst-chosen peer corporations function in the identical product market because the focal agency.

Which firms do you suppose can be good peer corporations to decide on when analyzing Colgate-Palmolive? Morningstar lists Procter & Gamble and Unilever as high friends for the corporate. Regardless of being listed on a US inventory alternate, Unilever has a modest 0.69 FSB rating with Colgate-Palmolive.

That is doubtless as a result of the corporate makes use of Worldwide Monetary Reporting Requirements to organize its monetary statements. Utilizing totally different accounting requirements reduces comparability resulting from variations within the recognition and presentation guidelines. In distinction, P&G and Colgate-Palmolive have a better FSB rating of 0.77, suggesting a better comparability than Unilever and Colgate-Palmolive.

In distinction to Morningstar’s method, Google Finance creates an inventory of peer corporations primarily based on traders’ co-search exercise. Notably, among the many peer corporations Google Finance lists for Colgate-Palmolive is Coca-Cola. Though this statement could appear unintuitive at first blush, our methodology means that, from a monetary assertion benchmarking perspective, Coca-Cola can be a wonderful match on this case as a result of its FSB rating with Colgate-Palmolive is properly above the typical at 0.82. This will clarify why traders extensively co-search the monetary info of the 2 firms.

Validation and Testing

After validating and testing the pairwise FSB metric, we aggregated knowledge throughout all {industry} friends of the focal agency to grasp how simple it’s to benchmark a agency’s monetary statements general. This course of yielded a big panel of firm-level FSB knowledge. Additionally, to complement our methodology, we decomposed FSB on the monetary assertion degree, producing separate FSB scores for the revenue assertion, stability sheet, and assertion of money flows.

Whereas analysts’ consensus earnings and internet debt forecasts are extra correct when firm-level FSB is excessive (i.e., it’s simple to benchmark and perceive a agency’s monetary statements), revenue assertion and stability sheet benchmarking play totally different roles in these outcomes.

We discover that the Revenue assertion FSB rating predicts the accuracy of earnings forecasts however not internet debt forecasts. In distinction, stability sheet FSB rating predicts the accuracy of internet debt forecasts, however not earnings forecasts. In financial phrases, a one-standard-deviation enhance in revenue assertion (stability sheet) FSB is related to a 17.3% (12.1%) extra correct consensus earnings (internet debt) forecasts. These findings spotlight that benchmarking advantages rely on the context of the evaluation. 

For the Investor: Trade, Trade-Dimension, or FSB Friends

Past optimistic analyst outcomes, a key query for traders is whether or not selecting peer corporations primarily based on FSB improves valuation with comparables. To this finish, we in contrast the predictive means of the valuation multiples shaped utilizing FSB-based friends to these of the fashions using conventional strategies for peer agency choice, resembling industry- and size-based friends. Particularly, we regressed the longer term enterprise value-to-sales ratio (EVS) of the focal agency on the typical EVS calculated for 3 units of friends: (1) {industry} friends, (2) industry-size friends, and (3) FSB friends. 

When predicting one-year, two-year, and three-year-ahead EVS, the fashions utilizing the typical valuation a number of of FSB-based friends persistently outperform these using solely industry- and industry-size friends. As an example, the R-squared of the mannequin predicting one-year-ahead EVS will increase from 24.8% to 31.8% when the typical EVS of the 4 highest FSB friends is included within the mannequin.

In conclusion, we notice that FSB is an easy, easy measure summarizing the overlap in peer corporations’ underlying economics and accounting selections, that are the important thing components that form monetary statements. FSB is accessible on the pairwise and agency ranges, permitting exterior customers to seek out appropriate peer corporations for varied functions, together with relative efficiency, compensation, and valuation benchmarking.