NCB deemed market's most accurate broker

NCB is the most accurate broker overall in the Irish market, according to analyst research group AQ. The stockbroker's analysts took three of the top five spots for the accuracy of their recommendations. However, Merrion Capital's Gavin Kelleher was the top individual, with every one of his recommendations delivering for investors.

The British company has released its second annual review of the performance of stockbrokerages covering Irish listed companies. The AQ review spans the 12 months to the end of last March.

Merrion was also the most accurate overall in forecasting earnings per share (eps) for Irish listed companies, although Ireland's largest broker, Davy, had six of the top 10 analysts on eps forecasts.

In terms of individual analysts, Davy's Emer Lang and Scott Rankin, who cover the financials, were deemed to have outperformed their peers most significantly over the course of the year. Again, Davy analysts dominated the top 10 of the list of portfolio outperformance relative to peers. However, Goodbody's Peter Gunn and ABN Amro's Ian Smilie featured prominently.

Davy's failure to land the overall top ranking on recommendations is due to its policy of not issuing specific "buy" and "sell" notes, on which the rankings are based.

One of the smaller brokerages, Dolmen, took top spot on overall hit rate - the percentage of recommendations which correctly forecast the direction a stock will take - with a hit rate of almost 77 per cent on the 27 stocks it covered, just ahead of Goodbody, which had a hit rate of almost 75 per cent on a larger portfolio of 36 stocks.

Glanbia emerged as the most predictable stock in terms of analysts' ability to forecast the company's earnings per share. It was followed by Irish Life & Permanent, Bank of Ireland and CRH.

Earnings at smaller companies tended to be less easy to predict for Irish market analysts, with medical devices firm Clearstream Technologies and Celtic Resources proving to be the most difficult.